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T H E
LOGIC OF VEGETARIANISM
A.S.S.A. Y.S AAWD O/A/, O GOES
BY
HENRY S. SALT
Author of “The Life of Henry David Thoreau"
TL Oil O C it
THE IDEAL PUBLISHING UNION, LIMITED
33 PATERNOSTER Row, E.C.
I 899
P R E F A C E .
IT is an open secret among book-men that a Preface,
rightly regarded, is a word confidentially spoken in the
ear of the critic. How, then, in prefacing these chapters
reprinted from The Vegetarian, shall I appeal to the busy
reviewer to concern himself with the logic of those peculiar
people who do not eat the dead bodies of oxen, sheep, and
swine 2 If this book were some strange tale of outlandish
cannibalism, one might not despair of its acceptance; but
when the cannibalism is the every-day habit of the reader
himself, can one hopefully invite him to discuss it 2
Yet it may be urged that as there are in this country
some thousands of able-bodied (and, if I may say so,
able-minded) persons who abstain altogether from flesh-
meat, and many more who in part abstain, it is perhaps
worth the while of a prudent critic at least to acquaint
himself with their principles before he labels them as
“cranks.” It is just possible, I submit, that a diet which
has commended itself to such different thinkers as,
for example, Shelley and Thoreau, Wagner and Tolstoy,
Francis Newman and Edward Fitzgerald, may be more
than a passing craze—may even deserve the serious
attention of up-to-date journalists.
The craze, indeed, is in quite another quarter; for if
ever there were a superstition in which “shams and
delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality
is fabulous,” it is our fond belief in the savage old-world
flesh-diet, which, under no deeper disguise than that of
skilful cookery, has survived into these modern times.
Standing now on the verge of a new century, we may
opportunely bethink us that the science of eating, like
other sciences, is progressive, and that a civilised future
will not forever content itself with the diet of a barbarous
past.
298481
C O N T E N T S.
PREFACE ...
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY tº e º * * * tº gº º
CHAPTER II.
WHY “VEGETARIAN ???
CHAPTER III.
THE RAIson D’ETRE OF VEGETARIANISM
CHAPTER IV.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF VEGETARIANISM ...
CHAPTER V.
STRUCTURAL EVIDENCE tº º ſº tº º e © º e
CHAPTER VI.
DIGESTION
CHAPTER VII.
CONDITIONS OF CLIMATE
CHAPTER VIII.
THE APPEAL TO NATURE
CHAPTER IX.
THE HUMANITARIAN ARGUMENT
CHAPTER X.
PALLIATIONS AND SOPHISTRIES
PAG 3.
iii.
I3
I9
25
3I
36
4I
47
vi. Contents.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CONSISTENCY TRICK
CHAPTER XII.
THE DEGRADATION OF THE BUTCHER C & O
CHAPTER XIII.
THE AESTHETIC ARGUMENT ... e gº º © We a
CHAPTER XIV.
THE HYGIENIC ARGUMENT ...
CHAPTER XV.
FLESH-MEAT AND MORALS ... © tº Q
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT ...
49. CHAPTER XVII.
DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES ...
CHAPTER XVIII.
BIBLE AND BEEF ...
CHAPTER XIX.
THE FLESH-EATER’s KITH AND KIN...
CHAPTER XX.
VEGETARIANISM AS RELATED TO OTHER REFORMS
CHAPTER XXI.
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX
INDEX ... * e e tº @ is
PAGE
53
59
64
70
76
82
88
94
99
ICŞ
II 2
I 17
II8
THE LOGIC OF VEGETARIANISM.
—Q-
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
*T is the special purpose of these chapters to set forth
in a clear and rational manner the Logic of Vege-
tarianism. To the ethical, the scientific, and the
economic aspects of the system much attention has
already been given by well-accredited writers, but there
has not as yet been any organised effort to present the
Jogical view—that is, the dialectical scope of the arguments,
offensive and defensive, on which the case for Vegetarian-
ism is founded. I am aware that mere logic is not in itself
a matter of first-rate importance, and that a great humane
principle, based on true natural instinct, will in the long
run have fulfilment, whatever wordy battles may rage
around it for a time ; nevertheless, there is no better
method of hastening that result than to set the issues
before the public in a plain and unmistakable light. I wish,
therefore, in this work, to show what Vegetarianism is, and
(a scarcely less essential point) what Vegetarianism is not.
For though, owing to the propaganda carried on for the
last fifty years, there has been an increasing talk of
Vegetarianism, and a considerable discussion of its
doctrines, there are still very numerous misunderstandings

2 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
of its real aims and meaning. In this, as in other phases
of the great progressive movement of which Vegetarian-
ism is a part, to give expression to a new idea is to excite
a host of blind and angry prejudices. The champions Cf
the old are too disdainful to take counsel with the
champions of the new ; hence they commonly attribute to
them designs quite different from those which they really
entertain, and unconsciously set up a straw man for the
pleasure of pummelling him with criticism. Devoid
always of a sense of sympathy, and mostly of a sense of
humour, they absurdly exaggerate the least vital points in
their adversaries' reasoning, while they often fail to note
what is the very core of the controversy. It is therefore
of great concern to Vegetarianism that its case should be
so stated as to preclude all possibility of doubt as to the
real issues involved. If agreement is beyond our reach,
let us at least ascertain the precise point of our disagree-
ment.
With a view to this result, it will be convenient to have
recourse now and then to the form of dialogue, so as to.
bring into sharper contrast the pros and cons of the
argument. Nor will these conversations be altogether
imaginary, for, to avoid any suspicion of burlesquing the
counter-case of our opponents by a fanciful presentment,
I shall introduce only such objections to Vegetarianism as
have actually been insisted on—the stock-objections, in
fact, which crop up again and again in all colloquies on
food reform—with sometimes the very words of the flesh-
eating disputant. It is not my fault if some of these
objections appear to be foolish. I have often marvelled at
the reckless way in which those who would combat new
and unfamiliar notions step forth to the encounter unpro-
vided with intellectual safeguards, and trusting wholly to
certain ancient generic fallacies, which, if we may judge
from their appearance in all ages and climates, are indi-
genous in the human mind. Many of the difficulties which
the flesh-eater to-day propounds to the Vegetarian are the
same, mutalis mutandis, as those which have at various
times been cast in the teeth of the reformer by the apolo-
gists of every cruel and iniquitous custom, from slave-
holding to the Suttee.
Introductory. 3.
To show the unreality of these sophisms, by clearing
away the misconceptions upon which they rest, and to
state the creed of Vegetarianism as preached and practised
by its friends rather than as misapprehended by its foes—
such is the object of this work. To make “conversions,”
in the ordinary sense, is not my concern. What we have
to do is to discover who are flesh-eaters by ingrained
conviction, and who by thoughtlessness and ignorance,
and to bring over to our side from the latter class those
who are naturally allied to us, though by accident ranged
in opposition. And this, once more, can only be done by
making the issues unmistakable.
Incidentally I hope these pages may suggest to Our
antagonists that Vegetarians, perhaps, are not the weak,
brainless sentimentalists that they are so often depicted.
It is, to say the least of it, entertaining, when a critic who
has just been enquiring (for example) “what would become
of the animals' if mankind were to desist from eat-
ing them, goes on to remark of Vegetarians that
“ their hearts are better than their heads.” Alas, we
cannot truthfully return the compliment by saying of such
a philosopher that his head is better than his heart l It.
cannot be too strongly stated that the appeal of Vege-
tarianism, as of all humane systems, is not to heart alone,
nor to brain alone, but to brain and heart combined, and
if its claims fail to win this double judgment they are
necessarily void and invalid. The test of logic no less
than the test of feeling is deliberately challenged by us;
for it is only by those who can think as well as feel, and
feel as well as think, that the diet-question, or indeed any
great Social question, can ever be brought to its solution.
CHAPTER II.
WHY “ VEGETARIAN ?” P
HE term “Vegetarian,” as applied to those who
T abstain from all flesh food, but not necessarily from
Such animal products as eggs, milk, and cheese,
appears to have come into existence some fifty years
ago, at the time of the founding of the Vegetarian Society
in 1847. Until that date no special name had been
appropriated for the reformed diet system, which was
usually known as the “Pythagorean’’ or “vegetable diet,”
as may be seen by a reference to the writings of that
period. Presumably, it was felt that when the movement
grew in volume, and was about to enter on a new phase,
with an organised propaganda, it was advisable to coin for
it an original and distinctive title. Whether, from this
point of view, the name “Vegetarian' was wisely or
unwisely chosen is a question on which there has been
some difference of opinion among food reformers them-
selves, and it is possible that adverse criticism would have
been still more strongly expressed but for the fact that no
better title has yet been forthcoming. , -
On the whole, the name “Vegetarian" seems to be
fairly Serviceable, its disadvantage being that it gives
Occasion for Sophistry on the part of quibbling opponents.
In all controversies such as that of which Vegetarianism is
the subject, there are captious verbalists who cannot see
beyond the outer shell of a word to the thing which the
word signifies, and who delight to chop logic and raise
small obstacles, as thus:—
VERBALIST : Why “Vegetarian " ?
VEGETARIAN: Why not “Vegetarian" :
VERBALIST : How can it be consistent with Vegetarianism
to consume, as you admit you do, milk, butter, cheese, and eggs,
all of which are choice foods from the animal kingdom
(4)
Why “. Vegetariam ” 2 5
VEGETARIAN : That entirely depends on what is meant by
“Vegetarianism.”
VERBALIST : Well, Surely its meaning is obvious—a diet of
vegetables only, with no particle of any animal substance.
VEGETARIAN : As a matter of fact, such is not, and has
never been, its accepted meaning.
VERBALIST : You amaze me ! I have never heard such a
statement before.
VEGETARIAN: You would have heard it frequently, if you
had acquainted yourself with the history of the movement before
condemning it. The question which you have just raised was
often debated in the early years of the Vegetarian Society, and it
was always held that the use of eggs and milk was not prohibited.
“To induce habits of abstinence from the flesh of animals (fish,
flesh, fowl) as food,” was the avowed aim of Vegetarianism, as
officially stated on the title-page of its journal.
VERBALIST : . But the word “Vegetarian " ' What other
meaning can it have than that which I have attributed to it 2
VEGETARIAN : Presumably those who invented the word
were the best judges of its meaning, and what they meant by it
is proved beyond a doubt by the usage of the Society.
VERBALIST : But had they a right thus to twist the word
from its strict natural derivation ?
VEGETARIAN : If you appeal to etymology, that raises
another question altogether, and here, too, you will find the
authorities against you. No one has a better right to speak on
this matter than Professor J. E. B. Mayor, the great Latin
scholar, and he distinctly states that, looking at the word etymo-
logically, “Vegetarian * cannot mean “an eater of vegetables.”
It is derived from vegetus, “vigorous,” and means, strictly inter-
preted, “one who aims at vigour.” Mind, I am not saying that
the originators of the term “Vegetarian” had this meaning in
view, but merely that the etymological sense of the word does
not favour your contention any more than the historical.
VERBALIST : Your definition appears to be an after-thought,
designed to put a brave, appearance on an awkward title.
VEGETARIAN: No. We take our stand on the practical,
historical usage of the word. It was you who first played the
etymologist. We merely point out to you that etymology is a
game which can be played by more than one.
VERBALIST : Well, what does “Vegetarian" mean, then
How do you explain it yourself f
.6 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
i
º
.”
i
VEGETARIAN: A “Vegetarian" is one who abstains from
eating the flesh of animals, and whose food is mainly derived from
the vegetable kingdom.
The above dialogue will show the absurdity and injustice
of charging Vegetarians, as Sir Henry Thompson has
done, with “equivocal terms, evasion, in short, untruthful-
ness,” because they retain a title which was originally
invented for their case | The statement made by certain
champions of flesh-eating, that Vegetarians have changed
the meaning of their name, owing to inability to find
adequate nourishment on a purely vegetable diet, is
founded on sheer ignorance of the facts. Here are two
specimens of Sir Henry Thompson's inaccuracy. In the
Nineteenth Century, May, 1885, he wrote :
It is high time that we should be spared the obscure language, or
rather the inaccurate statement, to which milk and egg consumers are
committed, in assuming a title which has for centuries belonged to that
not inconsiderable body of persons whose habits of life confer the
right to use it.
Observe that in 1885 Sir Henry Thompson was under
the impression that the name “Vegetarian” (invented in
1847) was “centuries” old | Nor, names apart, was he
any more accurate as regards the practice itself, for it can
be proved on the authority of a long succession of writers,
from the time of Ovid to the time of Shelley, that the use
of milk and its products has been from the first regarded
as compatible with the Pythagorean, or “vegetable" diet.
The fact that some individual abstainers from flesh have
also abstained from all animal substances, is no justification
whatever of the attempt now made to impose such stricter
abstinence on all “Vegetarians,” on peril of being deprived
of their name.
In the Nineteenth Century, June, 1898, Sir Henry
Thompson's argument varies considerably from that of
1885. His assertion of the antiquity of the name “Vege-
tarian” has been quietly dropped ; 1n fact, its novelty is now
rather insisted on
They [the “Vegetarians”] emphatically state that they no longer
rely for their diet on the produce of the vegetable kingdom, differing
from those who originally adopted the name at a date by no means
remote.
lº
i
:
Why “. Vegetarian * * 7
But our critic is again absolutely mistaken. There is no
difference whatever between the diet of those who adopted
the name at the date by no means remote and that of those
who bear it now. Now, as then, there are some few
Vegetarians who abjure all that is of the animal, but the
rule of the Society now, as then, is that the use of eggs
and milk is permissible. At the Third Annual Meeting,
held in 1850, it was stated by one of the speakers that
“the limits within which the dietary of the Vegetarian
Society was restricted excluded nothing but the flesh and
blood of animals.”
To avoid any possible misunderstanding, let me repeat
that it is no part of the case for Vegetarianism to defend
the 11ame “Vegetarian" in itself; it may be a good name
or a bad one. What we defend is our right to the title,
an indefeasible historical claim which is not to be upset
by any such unfounded and self-contradictory assertions
as those quoted.
But, it may be said, even if the title is historically
genuine, would it not be better to change it, as it evidently
leads to misunderstanding 2
VERBALIST : Let me advise you, even now, whatever your
definition of “Vegetarian * may be, to adopt some other title less
open to discussion—something that will distinguish the purely
vegetable diet from the vegetable diet plus certain animal
products.
VEGETARIAN: We should be perfectly willing to do so,
but for two difficulties: first, that no other satisfactory title has
ever been suggested, and secondly, that as the word “Vegetarian”
has now taken a recognised place in the language, it would
Scarcely be possible to get rid of it. At any rate the substitute,
to have the least chance of success, would have to be very terse,
popular, and expressive. As you take SO kind an interest in our
nomenclature, perhaps you could advise us
VERBALIST : It is no part of my duty to find names for
faddists, but, as you ask me, I should suggest “flesh-abstainer,”
or “akreophagist.”
VEGETARIAN : . No, thank you ! We will not have merely
negative terms, if you please. We will not countenance the
notion that we are abstinents and nothing more. Far better than
that are such names as “humane dietist” and “food-reformer,”
but a compound title is cumbrous and unwieldy, and even then
S The Logic of Vegetarianism.
the full sense is not expressed. “Humane dietist,” for example,
ignores altogether the hygienic side of Vegetarianism, and “food-
reformer" might include anyone who is dissatisfied with the
present system, whether a Vegetarian or not.
VERBALIST : If a Vegetarian is one who abstains from flesh,
your objection to be called “flesh-abstainer” seems rather
unreasonable.
VEGETARIAN : I do not at all object to the use of the term
“flesh-abstainer” as explanatory of “Vegetarian,” but I do
object to it as a substitute, for as such it would give undue pro-
minence to our disuse of flesh-food, which after all is merely one
particular result of a general habit of mind, Let me state it in
this way : Our view of life is such that flesh-eating is abhorrent
and impossible to us; but the mere fact that this abstinence
attracts the special attention of flesh-eaters, and becomes the
immediate subject of controversy, does not make it the sum and
substance of our creed. We hold that in a rational and humanised
society there could be no question at all about such a practice as
flesh-eating ; the very idea of it would be insufferable. There-
fore we object to be labelled with a negative term which only
marks our divergence from your diet; we prefer something that
is positive and indicative of our own. And until we find some
more appropriate title, we intend to make the best of what we
have got.
The truth is, the whole “Why ‘Vegetarian'?” argu-
ment is a pettifogging and dishonest one. The practical
issue between “Vegetarians” and flesh-eaters has always
been perfectly clear to thos, who wished to understand it,
and the attempt made by the verbalists to distract atten-
tion from the thing in order to fasten it on the 11ame is
nothing but sophistical. Of this main practical issue, and
of the further distinction between the “Vegetarian * or
flesh-abstaining diet and a purely vegetable diet, I will
speak in the following chapter.
CHAPTER III.
THE RAISON D'ÉTRE OF VEGETARIANISM.
ever name be employed (and, as we have seen,
“Vegetarian’” at present holds the field), lies the
far more important reality. What is the raison
d'être, the real purport of Vegetarianism 2 Certainly not
any a priori assumption that all animal substances, as
such, are unfit for human food; for though it is quite
probable that the movement will ultimately lead us to the
disuse of animal products, Vegetarianism is not primarily
based on any such hard-and-fast formula, but on the
conviction suggested in the first place by instinctive
feeling, but confirmed by reason and experience, that
there are certain grave evils inseparable from the practice
of flesh-eating. (The aversion to N flesh food is not
chemical, but moråſ, Sócial, hygienic.) Believing as we do
that the grosser forms of diet not only cause a vast amount
of unnecessary suffering to the animals, but also react
most injuriously on the health and morals of mankind, we
advocate their gradual discontinuance; and so long as this
protest is successfully launched, the mere name by which
it is called is a matter of minor concern. But here on
this practical issue, as before on the nominal issue, we
come into conflict with the Superior Person, who, with a
smile of supercilious compassion, cannot see why we poor
ascetics should thus afflict ourselves without cause.
B"." the mere name of the reformed diet, what-
SUPERIOR PERSON : But why, my dear Sir (excuse me for
smiling !), why should you refuse a slice of roast beef ? What is
the difference between roasting an Ox and boiling an egg In
the latter case you are eating an animal in embryo. That is all.
VEGETARIAN : Do you not draw any distinction between the
lower and the higher organization ?
SUPERIOR PERSON : None whatever. They are chemically
identical in substance.
( 9 )
IO The Logic of Vegetarianism.
VEGETARIAN: Possibly; but we were talking not of chemistry
but of morals, and an egg is certainly not morally identical with
all OX.
SUPERIOR PERSON : Tut, tut ! How or where does the moral
phase of food-taking enter the science of dietetics
VEGETARIAN : At a good many points, I think. One of them
is the question of cannibalism. Excuse me for smiling, but why
would you refuse a slice of roast man
SUPERIOR PERSON : Is it necessary to introduce so revolting
a subject *
VEGETARIAN : Allow me to read you a passage from the
Encyclopædia Britannica : “Man being by nature [?] carnivorous
as well as frugivorous, and human flesh being not unfit for
human food, the question arises why mankind generally have not
only avoided it, but have looked with horror on exceptional
individuals and races addicted to cannibalism. It is evident on
Consideration that both emotional and religious motives must
have contributed to bring about this prevailing state of mind.”
SUPERIOR PERSON : Of course. Why read me all that
VEGETARIAN : To show you that what you call “the poral
phase of food-taking” has undoubtedly affected our diet. The
very thought of eating human flesh is revolting to you. TYet
human flesh is chemically identical with animal flesh, and if it be
true that to boil an egg is the Same thing as to roast an ox, it
follows that to butcher an ox is the same thing as to murder a
man. Such is the logical position in which you have placed
yourself by ignoring the fact that all life is not equally valuable,
but that the higher the life the greater the responsibility incurred
by those who destroy it.
Or it may be that the Superior Person, instead of deny-
ing that morals affect dietetics, himself poses as so austere
a moralist as to scorn the wretched half-measure of merely
abstaining from flesh-food while still using animal pro-
ducts. The result is in either case the same. The all-or-
nothing argument is sometimes put forward in this
fashion :-
SUPERIOR PERSON : Well, as far as the right or wrong of the
question is concerned, I would not care to be a Vegetarian at all,
unless I were a thorough one. What can be the good of for-
swearing animal food in one form if you take it in another f
VEGETARIAN: But surely it is rational to deal with the worst
abuses first. To insist on an all-or-nothing policy would be fatal
The Raison d’Etre of Vegetarianism. II
to any reform whatsoever. Improvements never come in the
mass, but always by instalment; and it is only reactionists who
deny that half-a-loaf is better than no bread.
SUPERIOR PERSON : But in this case I understand that it is
quite possible to be consistent. There are individuals, are there
not, who live upon a purely vegetable diet, without using
milk or eggs 2 Now those are the people whose action one can at
least appreciate and respect.
VEGETARIAN : Quite so. We fully admit that they are in
advance of their fellows. But it is natural that in this, as in all
other social movements, there should be such inequality, for the
: will always be adventurous just as the many will always hang
ack.
SUPERIOR PERSON : In what relation then do these stricter
dietists stand towards the main body of Vegetarians ?
VEGETARIAN: We regard them as pioneers, who are now
anticipating a future phase of our movement.
SUPERIOR PERSON . Oh, ho You admit then that this ex-
tremer Vegetarianism, which you don't practise, is the more
ideal diet 2
VEGETARIAN : Yes. To do more than you have undertaken
to do is a mark of signal merit ; but no discredit attaches on that
account to those who have done what they undertook. The
temperance folk, for example, who are pledged to abstain from
stimulants, are not held to be inconsistent because they take tea
and coffee—though these, it is now recognised, are stimulants also,
and are rejected by a few more advanced abstainers, just as
animal products are rejected by a few more advanced Vegetarians.
But the raison d'être of temperance is the avoidance of the special
evils of the grosser drinks; and the raison d'être of Vegetarianism
is the avoidance of the special evils of the grosser foods.
SUPERIOR PERSON : I regret to say it, but it seems to me that
you are playing a double game.
VEGETARIAN : In a certain sense (not the sense which you
intend) that is perfectly true. All reformers “play a double
game”; that is, they have two horizons, the nearer or practical
‘One, and the remoter or ideal. In the socialist movement, to
take another instance, the nearer horizon is state socialism, the
further is communism ; yet it is allowable to be a socialist
without being a communist. So in the diet question there are
the moderate Vegetarians and the advanced Vegetarians, those
who abstain from flesh food, and those who abjure all animal
substances. We belong to the former and far more numerous
I2 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
class, who hold that “the first step,” as Tolstoi has expressed it,
is to clear oneself of all complicity in the horrible business of the
slaughter-house.
SUPERIOR PERSON : Well, I must repeat that were I to practise
any form of asceticism, I should incline to that which does not do
things by halves.
VEGETARIAN: Of course. That is invariably the sentiment of
those who do not do things at all.
Asceticism I such is the strange idea with which, in
many minds, our principles are associated. It would be
impossible to take a more erroneous view of modern
Vegetarianism ; and it is only through constitutional or
deliberate blindness to the meaning of the movement that
such a misconception can arise. How can we convey to
our flesh-eating friends, in polite yet sufficiently forcible
language, that their diet is an abomination to us, and that
our “abstinence,” far from being ascetic, is much more
nearly allied to the joy that never palls 2 Is the farmer an
ascetic because, looking over into his evil-smelling pigsty,
he has no inclination to Swill himself from the same
trough as the swine P And why then should it be counted
asceticism on Our part to refuse, on precisely the same
grounds, to eat the Swine themselves 2 No ; our opponents
must clearly recognise, if they wish to form any correct
notion of Vegetarianism, that it is based not on asceticism,
but aestheticism, not on the mortification, but the gratifica-
tion of the higher pleasures.
We conclude, then, that the cause which Vegetarians
have at heart is the outcome, not of some barren academic
formula, but of a practical reasoned conviction that flesh-
food, especially butchers' meat, is a harmful and barbarous
diet. Into the details of this belief we need not at present
enter; it has been sufficient here to show that such belief
exists, and that the good people who can see in Vege-
tarianism nothing but a whimsical “fad” have altogether
failed to grasp its true purport and significance. The
raison d'être of Vegetarianism is the growing sense that
flesh-eating is a cruel, disgusting, unwholesome, and wasteful
practice, and that it behoves humane and rational persons,
disregarding the common cant about “consistency’ and
“all or nothing,” to reform their diet to what extent, and
with what speed, they can.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PAST AND PRESENT OF VEGETARIANISM.
of this reformed diet, for which such great merits are
claimed by its exponents, the practical man is
justified in asking for certain solid assurances, since
busy people cannot be expected to give their time to
speculations which, however beautiful in themselves, may
prove at the end to be in conflict with the hard facts of
life. And the first of these questions, is—What is the
historic basis of Vegetarianism 2. In what sense is it an old
movement, and in what sense a new one P Has it a past,
which may serve in some measure to explain its present
and guarantee its future ?
Such questions have been dealt with fully from time to
time in Vegetarian literature.” I can here do no more than
epitomise the answers. Vegetarianism, regarded simply
as a practice, and without relation to any principle, is of
immemorial date ; it was, in fact, as physiology shows us,
the original diet of mankind, while, as history shows us,
it has always been the diet of the many, as flesh-food has
been the diet of the few, and even to this day it is the
main support of the greater part of the world's in-
habitants. Numberless instances might be quoted in proof
of these assertions ; it is sufficient to refer to the people of
India, China, and Japan, the Egyptian fellah, the Bedouin
Arab, the peasantry of Russia and Turkey, the labourers
and miners of Chili and other South American States;
and, to come nearer home, the great bulk of the country
folk in Western Europe and Great Britain. The peasant,
here and all the world over, has been, and still is, in the
B". it may be said, before entering on a consideration
* As in Dr. Anna Kingsford's The Perfect Way in Diet, pp. 18-39.
13 )
I4 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
main a Vegetarian, and must for the most part continue
so ; and the fact that this diet has been the result, not of
choice, but of necessity, does not lessen the significance of
its perfect sufficiency to maintain those who do the hard
work of the world. Side by side with the tendency of the
wealthier classes to indulge more and more in flesh-food,
has been the undisputed admission that for the workers
such luxuries were unnecessary.
During the last half-century, however, as we all know,
the unhealthy and crowded civilization of great industrial
centres has produced among the urban populations of
Europe a craving for flesh-food which has resulted in
their being fed largely on cheap butchers’ meat and offal ;
while there has grown up in certain quarters a corres-
ponding belief that we must look almost entirely to a flesh
diet for bodily and mental vigour. It is in protest against
this comparatively new demand for flesh as a necessity of
life, that Vegetarianism, as a modern Organized movement,
has arisen.
Secondly, if we look back for examples of deliberate
abstinence from flesh, that is, of Vegetarianism practised
as a principle before it was denoted by a name, we find no
lack of them in the history of religious and moral systems
and individual lives. Such abstinence was an essential
feature in the teaching of Buddha and Pythagoras, and is
still practised in the East on religious and ceremonial
grounds by Brahmins and Buddhists. It was inculcated
in the humanitarian writings of great “pagan ” philo-
sophers, such as Plutarch and Porphyry, whose ethical
precepts, as far as the treatment of the lower animals is
concerned, are still far in advance of modern Christian
sentiment. Again, in the prescribed regimen of certain
religious orders, such as Benedictines, Trappists and
Carthusians, we have further unquestionable evidence of
the disuse of flesh-food, though in such cases the reason for
the abstinence is ascetic rather than humane. When we
turn to the biographies of individuals, we learn that from
the time of Plutarch to the time of Shelley, there have been
numerous examples of what is now called “Vegetarianism,”
not always consistent indeed, or continuous in practice,
yet sufficiently so to prove the entire possibility of the diet,
The Past and Present of Vegetarianism. I5
and to remove it from the category of generous aspiration
into that of accomplished fact.”
But granting that there is historic basis for the Vegetarian
system, the question is asked whether, on ethnological
evidence, it does not appear that the dominant races have
been for the most part carnivorous, and the subject races
Vegetarian--a line of argument which always appeals
strongly to the patriotic Briton.
PATRIOT : Come, now ; it is all very well to talk of philosophers
and poets, and I have no doubt you can point to Such names
among the founders of your creed, but what I ask is, Were the
founders of the British Empire Vegetarians ? Were any great
empires ever founded by Vegetarians ? Was Julius Caesar a
Vegetarian 2 Is Cecil Rhodes a Vegetarian 2 Can you give me
any instance of Vegetarianism as a fighting force :
VEGETARIAN : As regards the rank and file of conquering
armies, there are many such instances, both in ancient and
modern history. The diet of the Roman soldier was not that of
a flesh-eater, and the Roman Empire was assuredly not won by
virtue of flesh-eating, but by the hardihood which could subsist on
simple rations of wheat, oil, and wine. So, too, the armies which
built up the earlier empires of Egypt and Assyria were, for the
most part, Vegetarian. That is to say, while the rulers and
wealthy classes of fighting nations have been carnivorous, the
bulk of the soldiery, drawn from the frugal peasant class, has
been unaccustomed to such luxuries. The idea that the flesh-
eating races have everywhere subjugated the Vegetarians is quite
illusory.
PATRIOT : But surely in India the flesh-eating Mahomedan has
always conquered the Vegetarian Hindu ?
VEGETARIAN: Not by any means always. It took him centuries
of fierce fighting to do so, with all the advantages of religious
fanaticism on his side, as against an enemy weakened by internal
dissension and an enervating climate. But that Mahomedanism
does not depend on flesh-food for its fighting qualities may be
Seen from the case of that special ally and favourite of yours—
PATRIOT : Who is that So long as John Bull has his Beef, the
British Empire needs no allies. We stand alone.
VEGETARIAN: Let us say, then, your recent ally—the Turk.
* See the list of names cited in Mr. Howard Williams's Ethics of Diet,
a biographical history of the literature of humane dietetics from the
earliest period to the present day.
16 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
PATRIOT : Oh, the Turk I I have done with him ; I will make
you a present of the Turk.
VEGETARIAN : Well, he is certainly an awkward customer for
your argument. For the Turkish soldier, by universal consent, is
the best of fighting material, unsurpassed for hardihood and
courage, and you know what he lives on 2
PATRIOT : I beg your pardon ; I have lost all interest in the
Turk since he made friends with the Russian.
VEGETARIAN : Then I will read you what your own paper, the
Standard, said of him some twenty years back, at the time, mark,
when it was still “patriotic” to praise him :—“From the day of
his irruption into Europe, the Turk has always proved himself to
be endowed with singularly strong vitality and energy. As a
member of a warlike race, he is without equal in Europe in
health and hardiness. He can live and fight when Soldiers of any
other nationality would starve. His excellent physique, his simple
habits, his abstinence from intoxicating liquors, and his normal
Vegetarian diet, enable him to support the greatest hardships,
and to subsist on the scantiest and simplest food.” Have I said
enough to show you that Vegetarianism may be a fighting force 2
or shall we go on to the Russian f
PATRIOT : Oh, by all means prove the Russian soldier to be a
Vegetarian | But it was the British Empire I first spoke of ; and
what I say is that this mighty realm on which, as you doubtless
know
VeGETARIAN : The sun never sets: I have heard you mention
it before.
PATRIOT : I say that this mighty realm on which the sun never
sets was won by a flesh-eating people, and by a flesh-eating
people it must be maintained. It is the Roast Beef of old
England, that is the real secret of our supremacy.
VEGETARIAN : It is a secret that has been a good deal talked
of. You do not think, then, that other causes, such as race-
mixture, Soil, climate, and geographical position, may have
contributed to the result 2
PATRIOT : They have, perhaps, contributed to it, but the true
basis of the British Empire, and our great national sustenance, is
Beef. If you talked to me for a week about your cabbages and
lentils, you would not shake my patriotic confidence in Beef.
VEGETARIAN : It is a case of Bos locutus. Thus, too, the
patriotic cannibal ascribes his war-like courage to his eating of
the slaughtered foe.
The Past and Present of Vegetarianism. 17
It will be objected, perhaps, that when food reformers
claim these fighting qualities for their diet, they are
proving just a little too much for their principles, as, for
example, in the reference to the sanguinary Turk as a
practical Vegetarian | If the outcome of vegetarian diet
is to be war and massacre, how is the system any better
than that which it fain would supersede 2 This brings us
back to the starting-point of the present chapter, the dis-
tinction between what may be called the old and the new
Vegetarianism. We have seen that so far as the common
practice is concerned, abstinence from flesh-food is as old
as history itself, and that rarer instances may be cited of
practice and principle combined ; but when we regard
Vegetarianism as a propagandist movement, a conscious
endeavour to benefit not merely the individual man but
human society itself, we have to recognise that it is a new
movement. From a mere habit of the many, or piety of
the few, it has become a reasoned principle, an organised
system, with a name and nomenclature of its own ; in
vulgar language it is an —ism, and, like other kindred
—isins, a part of the great humanitarian impulse of the
past hundred years. As I have elsewhere said, “It was
not until after the age of Rousseau that Vegetarianism
began to assert itself as a system, a reasoned plea for the
disuse of flesh-food, as advanced in the writings of Ritson,
Nicholson, Lambe, Shelley, Gleizès, and Sylvester Graham.
In this sense it is a new ethical principle, and its import
as such is only now beginning to be generally under-
Stood.” ”
The significance of this distinction is considerable.
Modern “Vegetarianism'' is the same, yet not the same,
as the “flesh-abstinence ’’ that dates from earlier times—
the same in so far as the actual dietary is concerned, and
in some fewer cases the same in principle, but different
altogether in the spirit by which that principle is informed.
The humane Vegetarianism, for example, of the modern
Russian sect, the Dukhobortsi, or “Spirit Wrestlers,” is a
far more active, potent, and conscientious influence than
the ascetic Vegetarianism of the old religious orders or
the ceremonial Vegetarianism of the pious Brahmin ; for
* Humanitarian Essays : Article on “The Humanities of Diet.”
I8 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
to the Dukhobortsi such abstinence from flesh-food, like
the refusal to bear arms (the cause of their bitter perse-
cution by the Russian Government), is an integral part of
a life devoted to love and goodwill towards all sentient
beings. It is not claimed that all modern Vegetarians are
on so high a plane as this ; such, nevertheless, is at least
the ideal of the newer Vegetarianism, and for this reason
it would be ridiculous to judge Vegetarianism as a whole
by the character of those races who happen to have been
abstainers from flesh, and who are merely quoted as
proving the physical sufficiency of the diet. In a word,
ethnical Vegetarianism and ethical Vegetarianism are two
very different things.
It has also to be remembered that the modern Vege-
tarian appeals not to humane instinct only, but to
physiological facts, and that the movement has now
become to a very large extent a scientific and hygienic
one, thus again differing widely from the merely empirical
and unconscious Vegetarianism of earlier times. These
several aspects of the system will be reviewed in suc-
ceeding chapters; it is enough here to repeat that
Vegetarianism as a practice is immemorial, as a precept
is of great antiquity, but as an Organised cult is one of the
new revolutionary forces of the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER V.
STRUCTURAL EVIDENCE.
X ſ have seen, then, that Vegetarianism, though new
T as a propagandist doctrine, has its historical
record ; but if we wish thoroughly to under-
stand its origin, we must go back beyond history
to the more ancient and more durable evidence of the
organic structure of Man. Here we come in conflict with
what is perhaps the strangest of the many strange pre-
judices that oppose the humane diet—the Superstition, so
common among the uneducated, and Connived at, if not
shared, by some of the “scientific ’’ themselves, that the
verdict of comparative anatomy is fatal to the Vegetarian,
claims. So far is this from being the case that the great
naturalists, from Linnaeus Onward, give implicit judgment
to the contrary, by classing mankind with the frugivorous
family of the anthropoid apes. Thus Sir Richard Owen
says:— .
“The Apes and Monkeys, which Man most nearly resembles in his
dentition, derive their staple food from fruits, grain, the kerneis of nuts,
and other forms in which the most sapid and nutritious tissues of the
vegetable kingdom are elaborated ; and the close resemblance between
the Quadrumanous and the Human dentition shows that Man was,
from the beginning, more especially adapted ‘to eat of the fruit of the
trees of the garden.’”—Odontography, ch. x., p. 471, 1840-1845.*
And here is the more recent verdict of Sir Benjamin
Richardson :-
“On the whole I am bound to give judgment on the evidence of the
teeth rather in favour of the Vegetarian argument. It seems fairest of
* This sentence is quoted only for what it is worth, viz., as proving
that, in Owen's opinion, Man was originally frugivorous. If the whole
passage in Odontography be studied, it will be seen that Owen cannot
fairly be cited as a Vegetarian authority, because, after alluding to
the fact that the apes occasionally eat insects, eggs, and young birds,
he sums up in favour of what he calls “the frugivorous and mixed
regimen of the Quadrumana and Man.” This point I have dealt with.
later in the chapter.
( 19 )
2O The Logic of Vegetarianism.
'fair to read from Nature that the teeth of man were destined—or fitted, if
the word destined is objected to—for a plant or vegetable diet, and that the
modification due to animal food, by which some change has been made,
is practically an accident or necessity, which would soon be rectified if
the conditions were rendered favourable to a return to the primitive
state. . . . By weighing the facts that now lie before us, the infer-
ence is justified that, in spite of the very long time during which man
has been subjected to an animal diet, he retains in preponderance his
original and natural taste for an innocent diet derived from the first-
fruits of the earth.”—Foods for Man, Longman’s Magazine, 1888.
Yet, in spite of such testimony, and more of an equally
authoritative kind, it is quite a common thing for some
flesh-eating “scientist” to allege against Vegetarianism
the conformation of the human teeth or stomach.
SCIENTIST : But our teeth, my good friend, our teeth ! What
can be the use of your talking about Vegetarianism, when we
both of us carry in our mouths a proof of the necessity of flesh-
eating.
VEGETARIAN : Speak for yourself, if you please ! But you
interest me greatly; for if your teeth are really such as you
describe them, the teeth of a tiger, you might make a fortune by
exhibiting them as a freak at the World's Show ! Might I just
look 2
SCIENTIST : Look at your own. If you have not your share of
“Canines,” the peculiarity is on your side.
VEGETARIAN: But surely you do not hold the popular fallacy
that man's canine teeth class him among the carnivora 2
SCIENTIST : They prove at least that he is an eater of flesh as
well as of vegetables. Why else has he got such teeth
VEGETARIAN : Why has a gorilla got such teeth “For the
purpose of combat and defence,” Owen tells us, not of food. And
if a gorilla, with “canines” much more developed than man's, is a
frugivorous animal, why must man with less developed “canines”
be carnivorous 2
SCIENTIST : Well, well; let us turn to the digestive organs, then.
Look at the immense difference between the human stomach and
that of the true herbivora. How can mankind get the required
nutriment from herbs, when we have not the necessary apparatus
for doing so
VEGETARIAN : But it has never been argued by us, nor is it in
any way essential to our argument, that mankind is herbivorous.
What have the herbivora to do with the question ?
Structura/ Evždence. 2 I
ScIENTIST : I have seen them quoted in your books as instances.
of strength and endurance
VEGETARIAN : To dispel the illusion that there is no chemical
nutriment in anything but flesh-food; but that is quite a different
thing from asserting that man is himself herbivorous. The point
at issue is simple. You charge Vegetarians with flying in the
face of Nature. We show you, from your own authorities, that
the structural evidence, whatever that may be worth (it was you
who first appealed to it), pronounces man to have been originally
neither carnivorous, nor herbivorous, but frugivorous. If you
think otherwise, what do you make of the apes f
The close similarity that exists between the structure of
man and that of the anthropoid apes is the hard fact that
cannot be evaded by the apologists of flesh-eating. In the
conformation alike of brain, of hands, of teeth, of Salivary
glands, of stomach, we have indisputable proof of the
frugivorous origin of man,—indeed, it is not seriously
questioned, by any recognized authority, that man was a
fruit-eater in the early stages of his development. As
far as comparative anatomy throws light on the diet ques-
tion, mankind and the apes are, so to speak, “in the same
box,” and he who would disprove the frugivorous nature
of man, must also disprove the frugivorous nature of the
anthropoid apes, a predicament of which the more intelli-
gent of our opponents are keenly aware, And this brings.
us to the second branch of the subject of this chapter.
Whatever his original structure, it is argued, man has
extended his resources in the matter of food, and has long
been “omnivorous,” while his middle position between
the carnivora and herbivora indicates that he is naturally
suited for a “mixed diet.” Omnivorous, it will be noted, is
the blessed word that is to bring comfort to flesh-eaters,
and the inconvenient apes, whom the naturalists class as
frugivorous, have somehow to be dragged in under the
category of “omnivorous.” But first a word about the
meaning of this saving term.
Now I wish to make it plain that Vegetarians are not
wedded to any a priori theory that the lines of dietetic
development are stringently limited by the original
structure of man. If the flesh-eater appeals, as he so
Often does, to physical structure, with the intent of
attributing Carnivorous instincts to mankind, we confront
32 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
him with an array of scientific opinion which quickly
makes him wish he had let the subject alone ; but if he
insists on the “evolutional ’’ rather than the “natural ”
aspect of the problem, we are equally ready to meet him
on this newer ground. But we decline to fall victims to
the rather disingenuous quibble that lurks in the specious
application to mankind of the term “omnivorous.” For
what, in the present connection, does the word “omni-
vorous” mean P. It cannot, obviously, mean that manshould,
like the hog, eat everything, for, if so, it would sanction not
only flesh-eating but cannibalism, and we should have to
class mankind (so Professor Mayor has wittily remarked)
as hominivorous ! It must mean, presumably, that man is
fitted to eat not everything, but anything—vegetable food or
animal food—implying that he is eclectic in his diet, free to
choose what is good and reject what is bad, without being
bound by any original law of nature.” To the name
“omnivorous,” used not in the hoggish sense, but in
this rational sense, and not excluding, as the scientists
would absurdly make it exclude, the force of moral and
Other considerations, the Vegetarian need raise no objection.
Man is “omnivorous,” is he He may select his own
diet from the vegetable and animal kingdoms ? Well and
good : that is just what we have always advised him to do,
and we are prepared to give reasons, moral and hygienic,
why, in making the selection, he should omit the use, not
of all animal products, but of flesh. The scientists cannot
have it both ways. They cannot dogmatise on diet as a
thing settled by comparative anatomy, and also assert that
man is “omnivorous,” i.e., free to choose what is best. But
now let us return to our monkeys.
SCIENTIST : You just now quoted the gorilla as a frugivorous
animal, but, on further consideration, I cannot admit him to be
so. He is omnivorous—like man. I have Sir Richard Owen's
authority for it.
* It has been well shown by Dr. J. Oldfield in the New Century
Review, Oct., 1898, that “omnivorism " in the hoggish sense, is not
characteristic of progressive mankind. “The higher we go in the
scale of life, the more we find selection taking the place of omnivorism.
The more complex the organism, the greater its selective capacity.
‘Selection, then, rather than “omnivorism,' should be the watch-cry
of the human race evolving upward.”
Structural Evidence. 23
VEGETARIAN : Indeed 7 You have been investigating his
character, I suppose, as a judge makes “careful inquiries” into
the record of a prisoner, in the hope of finding something to
palliate that dreadful charge of akreophagy :
SCIENTIST : Yes; and I acquit him of the charge. Are you
aware that chimpanzees and gorillas have been known to eat
flesh-food with much relish f
VEGETARIAN : What I Does the ape rush upon the antelopes,
and rend them with those canine teeth of his How horrible !
SCIENTIST : Not exactly that ; but I am told by Sir Henry
Thompson that “Sally,” the large chimpanzee so popular in the
Zoological Gardens, was not infrequently supplied with animal
food.
VEGETARIAN: Well, and how does that prove that the chim-
panzee is not naturally frugivorous 2 I should imagine that any
one of us, if placed in a cage, and called “Sally,” and stared at
all the year round by a throng of gaping visitors, might be liable
to aberrations. Even a Vegetarian might do the same.
SCIENTIST : But in their wild state, also, the baboons are
known to prey on lizards, young birds, eggs, &c., when they can
get them. Perhaps you were not aware of this when you called
the apes frugivorous 2
VEGETARIAN : I was quite aware of it, and in view of the
exceedingly small importance of these casual pilferings as com-
pared with their staple diet, I maintain that they are, for all
practical purposes, frugivorous. Indeed, so far from this
mischievous penchant of the apes being an argument against
Vegetarianism, it is most suggestive as explaining how the early
Savages may have passed, almost by accident at first, from a
frugivorous to a mixed diet.
SCIENTIST : Well, at any rate, it indicates that apes have a
tendency to become omnivorous.
VEGETARIAN: Yes, if you like to express it so ; and it is still
more evident that men have that tendency. But the question is
whether the tendency is rightly interpreted as giving a sanction
to flesh-eating. For flesh-eating, as we use the term, means the
destroying and devouring of highly-organised mammals, and is a
very different thing from the egg and lizard-hunting in which the
monkeys sometimes indulge. If you would confine your “flesh-
eating” to a few insects and nestlings, you would have a better
right to quote the example of the apes.
SCIENTIST : But if one eats an insect, why not an ox Is not
the principle the same 2
24 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
VEGETARIAN: No ; it is a very different one. But that is a
question which I have already discussed with our friend the
Superior Person.
Has flesh-eating been a necessary step in man's progress *
Without access to the flesh-pots, it has been asked, would
not the race have remained in the groves with the orangs
and the gorillas 2 I do not see that Vegetarians need
concern themselves to answer such speculations, which,
interesting though they are, do not bear closely on the
present issue. For though, as we have seen, the testimony
of the Past is in favour of a frugivorous origin, the problem
of the Present is one which we are free to solve without
prejudice, and whether the past use of flesh-food, by a
portion of the world's inhabitants, has helped or hindered
the true development of man is a matter for individual
judgment. We may have our own opinion about it. But
what we are concerned to prove is that flesh-eating can
offer no advantages to us now.
CHAPTER VI.
D I G E S T I O N.
ing do not seriously rely on the old bogey of “struc-
tural evidence,” though they have certainly not been
Over-anxious to dissociate their cause from whatever
Support has accrued to it through this too common mis-
understanding. The same is true of that other widespread
Superstition, that meat alone “gives strength,” i.e., that
vegetarian diet, as compared with a flesh diet, is deficient
in flesh-forming constituents, an error which the medical
faculty, as a whole, has secretly fostered and encouraged,
though in face of the existence of the elephant and
rhinoceros and other mighty herbivora, its responsible
spokesmen have of course not committed themselves to
any such absurdity. Except for the fact that thousands of
ignorant persons are still under the delusion that no ade-
quate nourishment is to be found in the vegetable king-
dom, it would not be necessary to point out that, by the
admission of all authorities, the albuminoids, carbo-
hydrates, oils, salts, and other chemical food-properties,
exist in vegetable no less than in animal substances, and
therefore that a vegetarian diet, even without the use of
eggs and milk, has access to all the needed elements. The
professional, as distinct from the popular objections to
Vegetarianism, are based nowadays on quite other argu-
ments, as may be seen from the suggestive admissions and
assertions made in the following passage from the British
Medical journal, June 4th, 1898 —
“Man is undoubtedly in his anatomy most nearly allied to the higher
apes, and these animals, though they show obvious tendencies to be
Omnivorous, are yet, in the main, eaters of nuts and fruits. But man
is not a higher ape, and in the process of development to his present
high status he has become Omnivorous. It is true that he can obtain
from vegetables the nutriment necessary for his maintenance in health,
but he has learnt that he can obtain what he wants at less cost of energy
from a mixed diet, and he is not likely to unlearn this lesson.”
W" see, then, that the scientific apologists of flesh-eat-
C
( 25 )
26 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
In the words that I have italicised we have the latest
Shibboleth of carnivorous “science” in its changing treat-
ment of the food question. Vegetarianism is not
“impossible” (as we used to be told it was) Oh, no
life, and even healthy life, can really be maintained on a
diet of vegetables (how many thousands of doctors have
asserted the contrary 1). But the inferior digestibility of
vegetable food—that is the trouble ! The poor Vege-
tarians must put their digestive organs to so great a strain,
and must eat so large a bulk of food in order to get the
requisite nourishment. Why, then, says the Chemist,
should they thus over-tax their systems, when they could
digest a few slices from a dead body at so much less cost
of energy P
Now if the chemist were a man of action, and not
merely a man of study, the practical aspects of this question
might at the outset give him pause. Had he known
Vegetarians, lived among Vegetarians, and talked with
Vegetarians, instead of regarding them theoretically, he
would be aware that the average Vegetarian eats decidedly
less in bulk than the average flesh-eater, and is seldom or
never troubled with the indigestion that the flesh-eater
dreads. So far from being compelled to consume a greater
bulk of food, it is the general experience of those who
have adopted Vegetarianism that they eat much less under
the new system than they did under the old, and it is a
frequent marvel to them, when they dine with their former
messmates, to see the huge amounts that they devour.
There is the further consideration, entirely overlooked in
the argument of the British Medical journal, that “Vege-
tarianism,” in the current sense of the word, is not a diet
of vegetables only, but includes the use of eggs, butter,
cheese and milk. For all which reasons the talk about
“less cost of energy” seems to have little practical bearing
on the subject under discussion, and it may be suspected
that the chemical chimera is quite as fabulous as the
phantom difficulties that have preceded it.
CHEMIST : Now listen I am a chemist, and I have no time to
think or talk of anything sentimental. To all your views about
vegetarian diet I have but one answer – “Hofmann's experi-
ments.”
Dºgestion. 27
VEGETARIAN: So Hofmann's figures have settled this diet prob-
lem for all time 2
CHEMIST : Undoubtedly. For they prove that the human
stomach can assimilate a greater percentage of animal than of
vegetable substances; in other words, that it requires a greater
exercise of digestive power to get an equal amount of nourish-
ment from vegetables. What have you to say to that? It is the
death-knell of Vegetarianism.
VEGETARIAN: What, again I have heard that death-knell
pretty often, but somehow the patient always seems to survive
CHEMIST : But what do you say to the experiments 2
VEGETARIAN : Obviously this—that they are quite devoid of
value unless we know who were the persons experimented on.
No statistics of the comparative digestibility of foods can be of
practical use unless the habits and conditions of those who digest
the foods are also neted. Custom and the personal element are
all-important factors in the result. Many vegetable foods, nuts
for example, are readily digested by Vegetarians accustomed to
their use, though almost universally found indigestible by flesh-
eaters.
CHEMIST : I cannot follow you into that. Let us keep clear of
all such sentiment, if you please, and bear in mind the great
precept which Dr. Andrew Wilson, in his application of
Hofmann's figures, has laid down for our guidance, that “Animal
matter, being likest to our own composition, is most easily and
readily converted into ourselves.” tº
VEGETARIAN : With all due deference to the Andrew Wilson
formula, may I ask what matter is likest to our own f
CHEMIST : Why, animal matter, of course.
VEGETARIAN : Yes, but what animal matter 2
CHEMIST : Oh, we don't go into that.
VEGETARIAN : But I do ; and I beg you to observe that the
“matter likest to our own composition ” is human flesh, so that
according to the Andrew Wilson formula, we all ought to be
cannibals, because for human beings human flesh must be the
most digestible of foods.
CHEMIST : Very likely it is so, though I do not approve of
Cannibalism.
VEGETARIAN : Then allow me to read you a sentence from
C. F. Gordon Cumming's book, At Home in Fiji. “At every
cannibal feast there was served a certain vegetable, also commonly
28 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
used by the cannibal Maoris of New Zealand, which was con-
sidered as essential an adjunct as mint-sauce is to lamb or sage
to goose. Its use, however, was prudential, as human flesh was
found to be highly indigestible, and this herbacted as a corrective.”
Now I ask you if that does not logically dispose of the Andrew
Wilson formula 2
CHEMIST : Nonsense, Sir I will not discuss cannibalism.
You fail to see that some things, though logical enough, may not
be expedient.
VEGETARIAN : I am delighted to hear you say that I beg you
to remember it when you next talk of “Hofmann's experiments.”
It is possible that flesh-eating, like cannibalism, is “not expedient,”
when it is regarded from a wider standpoint than that of the
chemical doctrinaire.
Nothing indeed could be more unscientific than the
attitude taken on this question by “scientists” of the
Andrew Wilson type. For in the first place, as pointed
out above, it is impossible to arrive at any scientific
conclusion as to the comparative digestibility of vegetable
and animal foods unless the conditions are equal, that is,
unless the persons experimented on are equally accus-
tomed to the food-stuffs they are invited to digest ; and
secondly, there is the question of the quality of the foods
supplied, for as Dr. Oldfield has remarked, “it is quite as
unfair to judge of the digestibility of the proteid of the
vegetable kingdom from one example of the legumens
as it would be to class all forms of flesh as indigestible
because veal or lobster happens to be so.” Against the
academic testimony of the Hofmann School of specialists
we may confidently set that of so distinguished a practical
chemist as Sir B. W. Richardson, who, by his personal
knowledge of Vegetarians and Vegetarianism, was
peculiarly qualified to judge. “From experimental obser-
vations which I have made, I am of opinion that the
vegetable flesh-forming substances may be as easily
digested, when they are presented to the stomach in proper
form, as are the animal substances of like feeding quality.”
(Foods for Man.)
But we must further challenge the pseudo-scientific
statement that the easy assimilation of food is “the end
and aim of all feeding.” It is not so ; and in so complex
Digestion. 29
a matter as that of diet it is most unscientific thus to
Select one desirable property out of many, and on this
narrow basis to build up a dietetic formula which can only
tend to deceive. For, not to mention that if flesh, as
Dr. Haig has shown in his work on Uric Acid, is a poison,
its digestibility would only add to its unwholesomeness,
there is the very important consideration that the present
Craze for easily assimilated foods must lead, if persisted in,
to the deterioration, by atrophy, of the digestive organs.
This “gospel of the liver fluke" has been admirably dealt
with by Dr. Oldfield in his reply to Sir Henry Thompson.
“This is the age of predigestion, and it is the age par excellence of
dyspepsia. Every train and tram and omnibus is placarded with the
same catch-cry “easily digested.’ Happily the English race is not
going to sink into the decadence of hypochondriasis ; the bulk of the
Community will even yet refuse to be classed in that pathological class
who ever demand those proteids which are “easy of digestion,’ and
will rather adopt the policy of every general, of every trainer, of every
teacher, namely, that “if you want an organ, a body, or a mind to be
strong, you must seek to give it regular and systematic hard work, and
not pamper it into atrophy by making everything easy for it.’”
In pleading that the hurry of the age, and the wear and
tear of modern existence, necessitate the provision of Con-
centrated and even predigested forms of food such as
those now in demand, Sir H. Thompson has lent his
sanction to a most dangerous principle, which indicates
that the man of the future may indeed become what one
of his scientific prophets had fondly depicted him, “a
toothless, hairless, slow-limbed animal, incapable of ex-
tended locomotion.”f
The true function of the Chemist in his general relation
to the diet question is not to be for ever concocting these
predigested food-stuffs which at best are only fit for
dyspeptic invalids, but to help the coming, dietary by
transferring to the vegetarian system some of the scientific
attention that has hitherto been solely devoted to flesh-
meats. “Men of practical science,” says Sir B. W.
Richardson, “ought to be at work assisting with their
* Nineteenth Century, August, 1898. The same protest has been
enforced in Edward Carpenter's writings, in the article “Health a
Conquest,” &c.
if Kay Robinson, Nineteenth Century, May, 1883.
3O The Logic of Vegetarianism.
skill in bringing about that mighty reformation. We now
know to a nicety the relation of the various parts of
food needed for the construction of the living body, and
there should be no difficulty, except the labour of research,
in so modifying food from its prime source as to make it
applicable to every necessity without the assistance of any
intermediate animal at all.” Why should not the Chemist,
instead of maintaining, like Mrs. Partington, a pettifogging
and quite futile opposition to the flowing tide, put himself
in the current of progress, and try to turn his special
knowledge to the furtherance of a noble end ?
CHAPTER VII.
CONDITIONS OF CLIMATE.
of defendants in an action at law, and a similar
device is adopted by those who would stave off the
hearing of the vegetarian case. “The Tropics” are
the convenient limbo to which this uncongenial subject
is most frequently consigned ; and it is with a proud sense
of humour and self-assurance that the British Islander, who
objects to alien immigration and all foreign frivolities,
warns the vegetarian heresy to keep clear of this inhospit-
able clime. Such diet may be all very well, he thinks, for
naked South Sea savages or sweltering Hindoos, but not
for the respectable hard-working inhabitants of the
Temperate Zone.
T try to “change the venue' is sometimes the policy
BRITISH ISLANDER: Vegetarianism f No thank you ; not
here ! All very nice in Africa and India, I daresay, where you
can sit all day under a palm-tree and eat dates.
VEGETARIAN : But I have not observed that when you visit
Africa or India you practise Vegetarianism. On the contrary,
you take your flesh-pots with you everywhere—even to the very
places where you admit you don't need them, and where, as in
India, they give the greatest offence to the natives.
BRITISH ISLANDER : Oh, well, it's no affair of theirs, is it, if I
take my roast beef ?
VEGETARIAN: Yet you think it your affair to interfere with the
cannibals when they take their roast man And have you
observed that it is in the Tropical Zone, not the Temperate Zone,
that cannibalism is most rife
BRITISH ISLANDER: Why do you remind me of that ?
VEGETARIAN : To show you that all this talk about Vege-
tarianism being “a matter of climate” is pure humbug. The
lust for flesh is a vicious habit everywhere, and nowhere a
necessity, except where other food is not procurable.
( 3I )
32 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
BRITISH ISLANDER : Do you assert, then, that it is as possible
to be a Vegetarian in England as in the tropics : You will
hardly say that
VEGETARIAN : Yes, as far as climate is concerned, I most
emphatically say so. What hinders people is not the weather,
but the force of habit and prejudice, ingrained and inherited for
centuries. Cold hearts, not cold winds, are the real obstacle.
BRITISH ISLANDER: But do we not need more oil and fat in
northern climates ?
VEGETARIAN : Undoubtedly; but these can be readily obtained
without recourse to flesh.
BRITISH ISLANDER : Then how do you account for the fact
that northern races have been, to so great an extent, Carnivorous 2
VEGETARIAN : Perhaps because in primitive times hunting and
pasturage were less toilsome than agriculture. But I am not
called on to “account” for such a fact. Their past addiction to
flesh-food no more proves the present utility of flesh-eating than
their gross drinking habits prove the utility of alcohol.
BRITISH ISLANDER: Can you quote any scientific authority for
your contention ?
VEGETARIAN : There is one which is all the more valuable
because it is an admission made by an opponent. Sir William
Lawrence wrote : “That men can be perfectly nourished, and
that their physical and intellectual capabilities can be fully
developed in any climate by a diet purely vegetable, has been
proved by such abundant experience that it will not be necessary
to adduce any formal arguments on the Subject.” ” “In any
climate,” mark And a diet “purely vegetable”; whereas all
you are asked to do is to forego the actual flesh-foods, and not
the animal products. But come now ! Ask me the great question
BRITISH ISLANDER : What is that ? There is only one other I
had in mind. What would become —
VEGETARIAN : That is it. Let us have it.
BRITISH ISLANDER : What would become of the Esquimaux *
VEGETARIAN : Of course ! I have always been profoundly
touched by the disinterested concern of the Englishman (when
Vegetarianism looms ahead) for the future of that Arctic people.
Well, perhaps the question of what Savages might do, or might
not do, need scarcely delay the decision of civilised mankind.
£or that matter, what would become of the polar bears It was
* Rees's Encyclopaedia ; art. “Man.”
Conditions of Climate. 33
not the millennium we were talking of, but the adoption of a
diet a little less disgusting than that which now prevails in
countries that call themselves civilised. If you can't bear to dis-
sociate your habits from those of the Esquimaux, why don't you
eat blubber 2
BRITISH ISLANDER: Oh, I didn't mean that.
VEGETARIAN : Then let us leave the Esquimaux to settle their
own affairs. The difficulty is, at most, a purely local one ; and
when the millennium arrives, I daresay it may be possible to
transport them South by State-aided emigration, or to provide
them, by Arctic and North Polar Railway, with plentiful vege-
tarian supplies. That is all they need, and the only trouble is
that they can't at present obtain it. At least they have a better
reason for eating blubber than Some people have for eating beef.
The thorough dishonesty of the excuse that Vegetarian-
ism “may be all very well in the tropics” is shown by
the fact that Englishmen, when living in the tropics, make
precisely the contrary statement “You would be sur-
prised,” writes Mr. B. K. Adams, a Ceylon correspondent
of the Vegetarian Messenger, January, I899, “if you knew
how much prejudice and opposition there is here. The
most amusing part is that nearly everyone says, It is all
very well being a Vegetarian in England, in a cool climate
like that, but out here in this hot, depressing, and
enervating climate, you must have meat, and some add
alcoholic stimulant.”
Twenty years ago, just the same “climatic ’’ argument
used to be put forward by the opponents of the
Temperance movement; it was impossible here to abstain
from alcoholic drink, whatever it might be elsewhere.
We do not often meet with that argument now ; on the
contrary, it is generally admitted that a disuse of alcohol
brings with it an increased power of hardihood and
endurance. As in drink, so in food. Those who fly to
stimulants obtain a temporary sense of comfort at the cost
of permanent vigour.
But granting that it is possible to support life on
vegetarian diet in northern climates, is it also possible,
asks the conscientious doubter, to live at one's highest
energy under such conditions 2 Look at the carnivorous
Mr. Dash's career, it is said, as compared with that of the
34 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
vegetarian Mr. So-and-Sol Was not the greater public
activity of the former attributable to his mixed diet P To
which it may be replied that any such personal comparison
is necessarily useless, from lack of sufficient data as to the
relative powers and opportunities of the persons compared.
It is obvious that a man whose convictions are unpopular
will have far less opportunity of carrying his principles
into action than one who is the mouthpiece of widely
current opinions, to the propagation of which he devotes,
perhaps, an equal amount of ability. For this reason it is
absurd to suggest that Vegetarians, or any other class of
unpopular reformers, are living on a less active plane,
because their activities are not of the kind that commend
themselves to the man in the street—or to that equally
fallible person, the man in the study.
The whole notion that Vegetarians are less able than
flesh-eaters to endure a severe climate is a delusion ; it is
not only untrue, but the contrary of the truth. “No one
surely suggests,” says Dr. Oldfield, “that the English
climate is too cold for a vegetarian dietary, when there is
the experience of the stalwart, hardy Scotch peasantry, in
a climate far more rigorous, developing brain and muscle
superior to the average Englishman, and this upon a
dietary which for generations has been so largely vege-
tarian that no one would dream of saying that the Small
amount of flesh eaten by them could have had anything to
do with the matter.” The same authority instances the
fact that both the horse and reindeer, though of tropical
ancestry, have adapted themselves to Arctic conditions
without change of diet.
Anyone who is intimately acquainted with the vege-
tarian movement in this country will bear me out when I
say that the average Vegetarian is much less susceptible
than the average flesh-eater to extremes of cold and heat,
and can get through an English winter in comparative
comfort, without any of the “wrapping up ’’ to which the
mixed dietists are reduced. It is amusing, indeed, after
being asked that common question, “Don’t you feel the
cold very much, as you don't eat meat f * to observe one's
* Mineteenth Century, August, 1898.
Conditions of Climate. 35.
questioner attired perhaps to face a moderate London
winter like a German student for a duel—a moving mass
of scarves and furs and overcoats, stoked up internally
with plates of beef and cups of bovril, and shivering
withal. “Poor fellow !” one thinks, “it looks as if you
were the person whose diet might be all very well in the
tropics (among your brother cannibals), but not for the
hard-working inhabitants of this northern clime !”
CHAPTER VIII.
THE APPEAL TO NATURE.
a snow-drift, Vegetarianism has to plough its way
before it can emerge into the field of free discussion,
there is none perhaps more inveterate than the
common appeal to “Nature.” A typical instance of the
remarkable misuse of logic which characterises such argu-
ment may be seen in the anecdote related by Benjamin
Franklin, in his Autobiography, of the incident which
induced him to return, after years of abstinence, to a flesh
diet. He was watching some companions sea fishing, and
observing that some of the fish caught by them had
swallowed other fish, he concluded that, “If you eat one
another, I don’t see why we may not eat you ’—a con-
fusion of icthyology and morals which is ludicrous enough
as narrated by Franklin, but not essentially more foolish
than the attempt so frequently made by flesh-eaters to
shuffle their personal responsibility on to some supposed
“natural law.”
But let the carnivorous Anthropologist speak for himself.
0. the many dense prejudices through which, as through
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Now understand me ! I think this Vege-
tarianism is well enough as a Scntiment; I fully appreciate your
aspiration. But you have overlooked the fact that it is contrary
to the laws of Nature. It is beautiful in theory, but impossible in
practice.
VEGETARIAN : Indeed That puts me in an awkward position,
as I have been practising it for twenty years. .
ANTHROPOLOGIST : It is not the individual that I am speaking
of, but the race. A man may practise it perhaps ; but mankind
cannot do so with impunity.
VEGETARIAN : And why
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Because, as the poet says, “Nature is one
with rapine.” It is natural to kill. Do you dare to impugn Nature ?
( 36 )
The Appeal to Nature. 37
VEGETARIAN : Not at all. What I dare to impugn is your
incorrect description of Nature. There is a great deal more in
Nature than rapine and slaughter.
ANTHROPOLOGIST : What? Do not the beasts and birds prey
on one another ? Do not the big fish eat the little fish 2 Is it not
all one universal struggle for existence; one internecine strife 2
VEGETARIAN : No ; that is just what it is not. There are two
principles at work in Nature—the law of competition and the law
of mutual aid. There are carnivorous animals and non-
carnivorous, predatory races and Sociable races; and the vital
question is—to which does Man belong 2 You obscure the issue by
these vague and meaningless appeals to the “laws of Nature,”
when, in the first place, you are quoting only part of Nature's
ordinance, and secondly, have not yourself the least intention of
conforming even to that part.
ANTHROPOLOGIST : I beg your pardon. In what do I not
conform to Nature ?
VEGETARIAN : Well, are you in favour of cannibalism, let us
say, or the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes 2
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Good gracious, my dear Sir I must entreat.
you ! —
VEGETARIAN : Exactly You are horrified at the mere mention
of such things. Yet these habits are as easily justified as flesh-
eating, if you take “Nature” as your ſqodel, without specifying
whose nature ? The nature of the conger and the dog-fish, or the
nature of civilised man 2 Pray tell me that, Mr. Anthropologist,
and then our conversation may not be wholly irrelevant.
The idea that the Darwinian doctrine of the “struggle
of life” justifies any barbarous treatment of inferior races
is ridiculed by so distinguished an authority as Peter
Kropotkin, who points out that Darwin does not teach this.
“He proves that there is a struggle for existence in order
to put a check on the inordinate increase of species. But
this struggle is not to be understood in a crude and exclu-
sive sense ; there is a law of competition, but there is also
—what is still more important—a law of mutual aid, and
as soon as the scientist leaves his laboratory, and comes
out into the open woods and meadows, he sees the impor-
tance of this law. Only those animals who are mutually
helpful are really fitted to survive ; it is not the strong,
38 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
but the co-operative species that endure.”” So too, with
reference to the strange notion that a guide for human
conduct may be deduced from some particular animal
instinct, taken at hap-hazard from its surroundings, a
timely warning is addressed to such crude reasoners by
Professor J. Arthur Thomson in his Study of Animal Life.
“What we must protest against is that one-sided interpre-
tation according to which, individualistic competition is
nature's sole method of progress. . . . The precise
nature of the means employed and ends attained must be
carefully considered, when we seek from the records of
animal evolution support or justification for human
conduct.”
It may be said, however, that though man is fitted to
co-operate peacefully with his fellows, he is not bound
by any such ties of brotherhood to the lower animals, and
that it is “natural ” that he should prey on the non-human
races, even if it be not natural that he should seek pleasure
at the cost of his fellow-man. But in reality Nature knows
no such bridgeless gulf between the human and the non-
human intelligence, and it is impossible, in the light of
modern science, to draw any such absolute line of demar-
cation between man and “the animals” as in the now
discredited theory of Descartes. We are learning to get
rid of these “anthropocentric ’ delusions, which, as has
lately been pointed out by the author of Evolutional Ethics
and Animal Psychology, “treat man as a being essentially
different and inseparably set apart from all other sentient
creatures, to which he is bound by no ties of mental
affinity or moral obligation "; whereas in fact, “man is as
truly a part and product of Nature as any other animal,
and this attempt to set him up as an isolated point outside
of it is philosophically faise and morally pernicious.”
The talk, then, about Nature being “one with rapine,”
is a mere form of special pleading, which will not stand a
moment’s examination in the full light of fact. If man is
determined to play the part of tiger among his less power-
ful fellow-beings, he will have to go elsewhere than to
Nature to obtain a warrant for his deeds, for as far as the
* Humane Science Lectures: Summary of address given by Prince
Ktopotkin at Essex Hall, Nov. 17th, 1896.
The Appeal to Wature. 39
indications of Nature carry weight, they suggest that man,
by his physical structure and his compassionate instincts,
belongs unmistakably to the sociable and not the predatory
tribes, and that by constituting himself a “beast of prey’”
on a vast artificial scale, he is doing the greatest possible
wrong to nature (i.e., to his own nature) instead of conform-
ing to it. Our innate horror of bloodshed—a horror which
only long custom can deaden, and which, in spite of past
centuries of violence, is so powerful at the present time—
is proof positive that we are not naturally adapted for a
sanguinary diet; and, as has often been pointed out, it is
only by delegating to others the detested work of slaughter-
ing, and by employing cookery to conceal the uncongenial
truth, that thoughtful persons can tolerate the practice of
flesh-eating. If Nature pointed us to such a diet, we
should feel the same instinctive appetite for raw flesh as
we now feel for ripe fruit, and a slaughter-house would be
more delightful to us than an orchard. It is not Nature,
but Custom, that is the guardian deity of the flesh-eater.
But we have not quite exhausted the appeal to Nature ;
we have still to speak of the common objection to Vege-
tarianism that “it is necessary to take life.”
ANTHROPOLOGIST : I have a most important argument to put
before you. Must you not face the fact that, in this imperfect
world, it is necessary to take life 2 How can it be immoral to do
what necessity imposes :
VEGETARIAN : We never said that it was immoral.
ANTHROPOLOGIST : You never said that it was immoral to take
life P
VEGETARIAN : Certainly not. Who pretends that we said so
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Who pretends Why it is notorious that
you say so I Only this morning I read in Dr. Andrew Wilson's
weekly “Science Jottings,” that “one of the chief objections of
the vegetarian faddist to indulging in flesh is that it is immoral to
take life.”
VEGETARIAN : But, as it happens, Dr. Andrew Wilson was
jotting nonsense when he made that statement.
ANTHROPOLOGIST : What do you say then :
VEGETARIAN : I think you should have made that inquiry
before you began to criticise us. I will leave you to proceed,
What is this new great argument from Nature ?
4O The Logic of Vegetarianism.
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Well, I was going to ask whether Vege-
tarians would allow their premises to be swarming with rats and
mice, and other similar pests.
VEGETARIAN : I have never heard of any Vegetarians who
were so long-suffering. But please come to the argument. My
time is rather short.
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Why, that is the argument 1 If you don't
think it immoral to kill rats and mice, why do you object to flesh-
eating f
VEGETARIAN: We do not say that it is immoral to “take life,”
but that it is immoral to take life unnecessarily. It is not immoral
to destroy rats and mice, because it is necessary to do so. It is
immoral to kill animals for the table, because it is not necessary
to do so. Do you ever tread on beetles 2
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Yes, by accident. I could not help it. I am
a most humane man.
VEGETARIAN : Oh, of course. But supposing that you wished
to murder someone, would you think yourself justified in doing so
because you had trodden on beetles—because, in fact, sometimes
it is “necessary to take life”
ANTHROPOLOGIST : Certainly not. How can you suspect me of
being so immoral There is a great difference between taking
the life of a beetle by accident and of a man by design. There
are degrees of responsibility, you know.
VEGETARIAN : Ah you have got your answer, then. Good
morning !
How is it, we wonder, that rational beings can commit
themselves to such irrational arguments as this appeal to
what is called “Nature,” but is in reality only an isolated
section of Nature, viewed apart from the rest ? Let Ben-
jamin Franklin himself supply the answer. For in narrat-
ing that incident of the cod-fish to which I have alluded,
he humorously hints that his philosophical conclusion, “If
you eat one another, I don’t see why we may not eat you,”
was not uninfluenced by the fact that he had been “a great
lover of fish" in early life, and that the fish smelt “admir-
ably well” as it came out of the frying-pan ; and he sagely
adds that one of the advantages to man of being a “reason-
able creature' is that he can find or make a “reason '' for
anything he has a mind to do. Such is the logic of the
flesh-eater, in which the wish is father to the theught, and
mixed thinking leads by a convenient process to a mixed
diet.
CHAPTER 1X.
THE HUMANITARIAN ARGUMENT.
ments which have so far come under review have been
such as are based on purely 1materialistic grounds, as if
the question were wholly one for doctors and scientists
to decide; and it has been shown that, even thus, there is
no sort of warrant for the Supercilious dismissal of Vege-
tarianism as a theory Condemned in advance by some
superior tribunal. But the question is not one for the ipse
dixit of the specialist. It is also a moral question of vely
great moment, and this fact gives a new significance to
such unwilling admissions as that quoted from the British
Medical journal, that “man can obtain from vegetables
the nutriment necessary for his maintenance in health ''
(i.e., from vegetables only, much more, therefore, from a
vegetable diet with the addition of eggs and milk). The
practicability of Vegetarianism being thus fully granted, it
is impossible to pretend that moral considerations are not.
relevant to the controversy, and that in forming an opinion
on the vexed problem of diet we should not give due
weight to the promptings of humaneness.
People often talk as if the humanitarian plea were some
fanciful external sentiment that has been illogically
thrust into the discussion ; whereas in truth it is one of
the innermost facts of the situation which no sophistry can
escape. Our humane instincts are unalterably implanted
in us, and we cannot deny them if we would ; to be human
is to be humane. “There is something in human nature,”
says an old writer,” “resulting from our very make and
constitution, which renders us obnoxious to the pains of
others, causes us to sympathise with them, and almost
comprehends us in their case. It is grievous to see or
I' will have been noted that the anti-vegetarian argu-
* Wollaston, Religion of Nature, 1759.
( 4I )
42 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
hear (and almost to hear of) any man, or even any animal
whatever, in torture.” This is now so generally admitted
that the point in dispute is not so much the duty of
humaneness as some particular application of that duty, as
in the present case to the slaughter of animals for food.
What have humane people to say to the tremendous mass
of animal suffering inflicted in the interests of the Table 2
By the unthinking, of course, these sufferings, being
invisible, are almost wholly overlooked, while the deaden-
ing power of habit prevents many kindly persons from
exercising, where their daily “beef.” and “mutton” are con-
cerned, the very sympathies which they so keenly manifest
elsewhere ; yet it can hardly be doubted that if the veil of
custom could be lifted, and if a clear knowledge of what is
involved in “Butchery” could be brought home, with a
sense of personal responsibility, to everyone who eats flesh,
the attitude of society towards the vegetarian movement
would be very different from what it is now. If it be true
that “hunger is the best sauce,” it may also be said that
the bon vivant's most indispensable sauce is ignorance—
ignorance of the horrible and revolting circumstances
under which his juicy steak or dainty cutlet has been
prepared.
Bon VIVANT: What is this? “Vegetarian’’ you call yourself f
Really now !
VEGETARIAN: And you ? You are a bon vivant. You “live
well,” I understand.
Bon VIVANT : Not ashamed of enjoying a good dinner, but
not greedy, I hope.
VEGETARIAN: Nor cruel, I suppose
Bon VIVANT : Cruel ! I subscribe regularly to the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
VEGETARIAN : And eat them.
Bon VIVANT : Why not ? A speedy painless death is no cruelty,
is it 2
VEGETARIAN: While you are finishing that choice beef steak, I
will tell you something of the speedy painless death of steak-
producing animals. It may serve as an aid to digestion, like a
musical accompaniment. *
The Humanitarian Argument. 43
DON VIVANT : Oh, you won't spoil my digestion. Fire away !
VEGETARIAN : Let us suppose then, that our friend (on your
plate there) hails from Ireland.
BON VIVANT : Delightful the green pastures of the Emerald
Isle ! Pass the mustard, please.
VEGETARIAN : And at one of the Fair Grounds, of which there
are several thousand in that island paradise, he meets the first
agent in his euthanasia—the Drover. “On such occasions,” says
the Report of the late Departmental Committee on the Inland
Transit of Cattle, “animals already, perhaps, exhausted and foot-Sore
from a walk of many miles, stand for hours on the hard road,
bewildered by the beating they receive and their unaccustomed
surroundings. . . . It was repeatedly asserted by responsible
witnesses that many of the drovers are brutally harsh.” So
ferocious is the treatment that in many cases, when the animals
are slaughtered, the hide, as butchers testify, simply falls off the
back, and is worthless even for use as leather. I hope your
steak is nice and tender 2
BON VIVANT : But why are not the brutal drovers punished
for it 2
VEGETARIAN : Perhaps because it is not for themselves that
they are driving. Then there is the journey in the railway
trucks, and we learn on good authority (Report of the Liver-
pool S.P.C.A.) that “the animals have frequently gone twenty to
twenty-four hours without food at the time they are driven on
the boats.” As for the delights of the sea-transit, you have read,
I Suppose, of what happens in Cattle Ships ?
BON VIVANT : Well, of course, in stormy weather there may be
accidents—
VEGETARIAN: No, I am speaking of the ordinary scenes of the
Cattle-traffic, and say nothing of the occasions (not so rare, either)
when the boats come into port with blood pouring from their
scuppers—
BON VIVANT : Thank you, thank you ! that is enough I
VEGETARIAN: We find it stated, in the Report of the Com-
mittee of Inquiry into the Irish Cattle Transit, that “the damage
sustained by cattle is very serious, and that the principal portion
of that damage is due to their treatment during shipment, while
on shipboard, and on debarkation.” On landing there is more
thrashing and tail-twisting, another railway journey, and then—
the Slaughterman. You have visited a slaughter-house, of
course 2
44 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
BON VIVANT : No, really, I must protest—
VEGETARIAN: Ah, then it should interest you ! The Drover's
task accomplished, the Butcher's begins. Yard by yard, and foot
by foot, with chains fastened to his horns, and sharp goads
applied to his flanks, the struggling animal is dragged into the
dark blood-stained shed, where he is lucky indeed if he be killed
by the first blow of the pole-axe—
BON VIVANT S Shameful I do not believe you. It cannot be.
VEGETARIAN : Then many well-known eye-witnesses must
have strangely perjured themselves. Dr. Dembo, for example,
says: “Cases in which several blows are required are very
frequent. On my first visit to the Deptford slaughtering yards I
found that the number of blows struck was five and more ”; and
he goes on to describe a case which he saw in London, when
twelve minutes elapsed before the animal
BON VIVANT : Stop I will hear no more.
VEGETARIAN : You will hear no more—but will you eat more ?
It is on you, not on the brutal drover or slaughterman, that the
responsibility falls. For this is the “speedy and painless” way
in which animals must be slaughtered that you may “live well.”
“I will hear no more.” That, said or implied, is the
most common and the most insuperable argument by
which the Vegetarian is confronted. It is the one great
stronghold of flesh-eating which remains from age to age
impregnable. For how can even Truth convince the deaf
and the blind 2 The horrors of the journey by sea and
journey by rail, of the Savage drover's goad, and the
clumsy butcher's pole-axe—if the Ordinary man and
woman, unimaginative and unfeeling though they are,
could see or even hear of these things, the end of the
controversy would be assured. By the few flesh-eaters
who have made enquiry, accidental or conscientious, into
the facts of the cattle traffic and butchering trade, it is not
denied that fearful cruelties are committed. Thus the
Meat Trades journal, which is not a sentimental paper,
remarks (December 29th, 1898,) of the sea and land transit,
that “Our cattle, sheep, and pigs are carried by Sea and
rail with the minimum care and maximum cost ; they are
bundled and shunted about as if they were iron.” Again,
Dr. T. P. Smith, writing in opposition to Vegetarianism in
the Fortnightly Review (November, 1895), allows that the
*
The Humanitarian Argument. 45
indictment of the slaughter-house “hits a grievous blot on
our much-vaunted civilisation.” There is a mass of printed
testimony to the same effect, which can be confirmed, as
often as confirmation is needed, by a visit to the shambles.
But that is a visit which the ordinary man will neither
undertake himself nor hear of from the mouths of others.
Much also might be said of certain special cruelties, such
as those involved in the supply of white veal or pâté de foie
gras, and other so-called delicacies; but it is unnecessary
to dwell on such refinements of torture, because it is the
ordinary every-day aspects of flesh-eating that are here
under debate. It is a terrible fact that the very prevalence
of the habit serves, more than anything else, to conceal its
full import ; and thus a large number of people, who,
in any other department of life, would indignantly
refuse to profit by the cruel usage of animals, are (without
knowing, or at least without recognising it) dependent for
their daily food on the continued and systematic infliction
of sufferings which, in their magnitude and frequency,
surpass all other cruelties whatsoever of which animals
are the victims.
These horrors, as I have said, are not realised by those
who are personally responsible for them. Or rather, they
are not directly realised ; for indirectly it is evident enough
that the more sensitive conscience of mankind is far from
easy about the morality of butchering, and would show
still greater uneasiness but for the quieting assurance that
flesh-food is a strict necessity of existence. This sense of
compunction has found at least partial expression in many
non-vegetarian works, as for example in Michelet’s “Bible
of Humanity.” “Life—death ! The daily murder which
feeding upon animals implies—those hard and bitter
problems sternly placed themselves before my mind.
Miserable contradiction | Let us hope that there may be
another globe in which the base, the cruel fatalities of this
one may be spared to us !”
Now, in view of these facts and these feelings, we have
a right to press the advocates of flesh-eating for some more
explicit and coherent statement than they have hitherto
accorded us of their attitude towards the ethics of the diet
question. If, as the scientists themselves admit, there is
46 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
no such cruel fatality as that which Michelet pictured,
and if flesh-eating is not to be regarded as necessary, but
Only as expedient, then it is in the highest degree
unreasonable to rule out humane considerations from their
due share in the settlement of this many-sided problem.
The British Medical journal has said that “There is not a
shadow of doubt that the use of animals for food involves
a vast amount of pain.” The same paper has said that
“Man can obtain from vegetables the nutriment necessary
for his maintenance in health.” Can it be doubted, that if
the average Englishmen were made aware of these two
facts, he would at least think Vegetarianism worthy of a
serious trial 2 To ask, as a Superior Person of science has
asked (not merely in these dialogues, but in actual debate),
“How or where does the moral phase of food-taking enter
the science of dietetics P” is simply childish. For Diet,
like other social questions, has its moral aspect, which
claims no less, and no more, than its due importance; and
it is because the “scientific” antagonists of Vegetarianism
have overlooked this fact that their judgments have hitherto
been so warped, illogical, and unscientific.
CHAPTER X.
PALLIATIONS AND SOPHISTRIES.
fuges to which our antagonists have recourse when
they find themselves face to face with the humanitarian
impeachment of the slaughter-house. If one half of
the popular prejudices were true, it might be supposed
that, in the discussion of so “fanciful” and “utopian’’ a
theory as Vegetarianism it would be its supporters who
would take refuge in metaphysical quibblings and Sophis-
tries, while its opponents would hold sternly to the hard facts
of life. But no l for when Butchery is the theme we find
the exact opposite to be the case, and it is the flesh-eaters,
those level-headed deriders of the sentimental, who sud-
denly become enamoured of the imaginary what-might-be
and the hypothetical what-would-otherwise-have-been, and
are disposed to turn their attention to anything rather
than the unpalatable what-is.
Now when the apologists of any form of cruelty are
reduced to the plea that it is “no worse ’’ that some other
barbarous habit, the presumption is that they are in a very
bad plight indeed. Yet we frequently hear it said that the
fate of animals slaughtered for the table is “no worse’’
than that of other animals—those perhaps that are used
for purposes of draught or burden—a quite pointless Com-
parison, because, even if the statement be true, the one act
of injustice can obviously be no excuse for the other. Or
it may be that the mortality of man himself, and his
liability to disease and accident, are alleged in mysterious
justification of his carnivorous habits, the suffering of the
animals being represented as brief and momentary in
contrast with the pathetic human death-bed : an argument
which reached its culminating point in Mr. Stead's delight-
ful assertion that of all kinds of death he would himself
prefer “the mode in which pigs are killed at Chicago,”
I' is instructive to note the desperate shifts and subter-
47 )
48 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
which mode, as he incautiously let out, he did not go to
see when he visited that city. I do not think we need
further discuss such remarkable preference ; it will be time
enough to do so when we hear of Mr. Stead’s lamented
self-immolation in the Chicago pig-shambles.
But it is said that domesticated animals owe a deep debt
of gratitude to mankind (only to be repaid in the form of
beef and mutton), because, by being brought within the
peaceful fold of civilisation, they have been spared all the
harrowing fears and anxieties of their wild natural life.
This, however, is a fallacy to which the great naturalists
give no sort of Sanction ; for it is obvious that, though the
life of a wild animal is liable to more sudden perils than
that of our tame “live-stock,” it is not on that account a
less happy one, but on the contrary is spent throughout
in a manner more conducive to the highest health and
happiness. Thus, Professor Alfred Russel Wallace says,
“The poet's picture of nature red in tooth and claw, is a
picture the evil of which is read into it by our imagination,
the reality being made up of full and happy lives, usually
terminated by the quickest and least painful of deaths.”
And Mr. W. H. Hudson : “I take it that in the lower
animals misery can result from two causes only—restraint
and disease; consequently, that animals in a state of nature
are not miserable. They are not hindered or held
back . . . . As to disease, it is so rare in wild animals,
or in a large majority of cases so quickly proves fatal, that,
compared with what we call disease in our own species, it
is practically non-existent. The ‘struggle for existence,’
in so far as animals in a state of nature are concerned, is a
metaphorical struggle; and the strife, short and sharp,
which is so common in nature, is not misery, although it
results in pain, since it is pain that kills or is soon out-
lived.”
Let us proceed, then, to the great Sophistical paradox
that it is better for the animals themselves to be bred and
slaughtered than not to be bred at all, that most comfort-
able doctrine which of late years has been a veritable City
of Refuge, or Grand Old Umbrella, to the conscientious
flesh-eater under stress of the vegetarian bombardment.
Hither flock the members of the learned professions
Palliations and Sophistries. 49
academies, and Ethical Societies, and fortify their souls
anew with this subtle Metaphysic of the Larder.
SOPHIST : Of all the arguments for Vegetarianism, none, in my
opinion, is so weak as the argument from humanity. The pig has
a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon.
VEGETARIAN : Indeed 2 And is that the view the pig himself
takes of it 2
SoPHIST : It is the view I take of it, speaking in the interests of
the pig. For where would the pig be if we did not eat pork :
He would be non-existent; he would be no pig at all.
VEGETARIAN : And would he be any the worse for that ?
SOPHIST : Yes, for he would lose the Joy of Life. And not the
pig alone, but all animals that are bred for human food. Their
death is the little price they necessarily pay for the inestimable
boon of existence.
VEGETARIAN : Then the giving of life implies the right to
take it 2
SoPHIST : Undoubtedly.
VEGETARIAN : Now let me first point out to you that it is not
only flesh-eating that would be justified by this argument. Vivi-
section, pigeon-shooting, slavery, cannibalism, any treatment
soever of animals or of mankind, where they are specially bred
for the purpose, might be similarly shown to be a kindness. Do
you really mean that ?
SOPHIST : I assume, of course, that the life is a happy one, and
the death as painless as possible.
VEGETARIAN : Neither of which conditions is in reality fulfilled !
For the wretched creatures that are bred and fed for the sham-
bles have none of the true joys of life, but from the first are mere
animated beef, pork, and mutton, while their death is nothing
better than a prolonged and clumsy massacre.
SOPHIST : But it need not be so. It is a mere question of
police and proper supervision. It should be imperative on all
those who confer life on animals to ensure absolute painlessness
for the last moment.
VEGETARIAN : It “should be " | So it seems that this remark-
able kindness of yours is, by your own showing, not an actual but
a hypothetical benefit. . The animals fulfil their part of the
compact by being killed and eaten, and you might fulfil your
part by killing them painlessly—only you don’t 1 Are you serious
in talking this stuff f
5O The Logic of Vegetarianism.
SOPHIST : This “stuff.”f Let me remind you, sir, that I have
the authority of such eminent philosophers as Sir Henry
Thompson, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Professor D. G. Ritchie, and Dr.
Stanton Coit. Do you call their academical reasoning “stuff”
VEGETARIAN: What else can it be called f For, as a matter of
fact, quite apart from the conditions, good or bad, under which
the animals live and die, it is a pure fallacy to say that it is a
kindness to bring them into existence.
SoPHIST : How so, if life is pleasant 2
VEGETARIAN : Because it is impossible to compare existence
with non-existence. Existence may, or may not, be pleasant;
but non-existence is neither pleasant nor unpleasant—it is
nothing at all. It cannot, therefore, be an advantage to be born,
though, when once you are born, the good and the evil are
comparable. The whole question is a post-natal not a pre-natal
one ; it begins at birth.
SOPHIST : Well, but supposing you were an animal, would you
not prefer
VEGETARIAN : Oh, that is a very old question. You will find it
all in Hansard. It was asked by Sir Herbert Maxwell when he
defended the cowardly sport of pigeon-shooting in the Debates
of 1883. “He wanted to ask the hon, member whether, if he
were a blue-rock, he would rather accept life under the condition
of his life being a short and happy one, and violently terminated,
or whether he would reject life at all upon such terms.”
SOPHIST : Hear, hear ! That is just what I say.
VEGETARIAN : Then you had better think over Mr. W. E.
Forster's reply, which puts the case in a nut-shell. He said that
Sir Herbert Maxwell “made one very amusing appeal, by asking
him [the member who introduced the Bill] to put himself in the
position of a blue-rock. But this would be difficult, for the posi-
tion was not a blue-rock in existence, but a blue-rock before it
was born.” Whereat the House laughed, and sophistry was for
the moment disconcerted.
But for the moment only ; for there have since sprung
up many other professors of this Metaphysic of the Larder,
though none of them, with the exception of Dr. Stanton
Coit, have had the hardihood to expound their theory in
detail—a wise reticence, perhaps, when it is seen how Dr.
Coit fared in his conscientious but humourless essay on
“The Bringing of Sentient Beings into Existence” (Ethical
World, May 7th, 1898). $
Palliations and Sophistries. 5 I:
“If the motive,” he opined, “that might produce the greatest number
of the happiest cattle would be the eating of becſ, then beef-eating, so
far, must be commended. And while, heretofore, the motive has not
been for the sake of cattle, it is conceivable that, if vegetarian Convic-
tions should spread much further, love for cattle would (if it be not
psychologically incompatible) blend with the love of beef in the minds
of the opponents of Vegetarianism. With deeper insight, new and
higher motives may replace or supplement Old Ones, and perpetuate
but ennoble ancient practices.
The “Ox in a Tea-cup,” be it observed, may henceforth
become the emblem of the concentrated humanity of the
Ethical Societies |
“But we frankly admit,” continues Dr. Coit, “that it is a question,
whether the love of cattle, intensified to the imaginative point of
individual affection for each separate beast, would not destroy the
pleasure of eating beef, and render this time-honoured custom psycho-
logically impossible. We surmise that bereaved affection at the death
of a dear creature would destroy the flavour.”
What a picture is conjured up by the sentence I have
italicised—the bereaved moralist, knife and fork in hand,
swayed in different directions by the call of duty and the
scruples of affection | And then he goes on to express a
fear that mankind, if they adopted Vegetarianism, might
become “less powerful in thought” I respectfully
submit that, in view of the arguments quoted, there is not
the smallest possibility of that.
The plea that animals might be killed painlessly is a very
common one with flesh-eaters, but it must be pointed out
that what-might-be can afford no exemption from moral
responsibility for what-is. By all means let us reform the
system of butchery as far as it can be reformed, that is,
by the total abolition of those foul dens of torture known as
“private slaughter-houses,” and by the substitution of
municipal abattoirs, equipped with the best modern
appliances, and under efficient Supervision ; for there is no
doubt that the sum of animal suffering may thus be greatly
lessened. There will be no opposition from the vegetarian
side to such reform as this ; indeed, it is in a large measure
through the personal efforts of Vegetarians that the subject
has attracted attention, whereas the very people who make
this prospective improvement an excuse for their present
flesh-diet are seldom observed to be doing anything
52 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
practical to carry it into effect. But when all is said and
done, it remains true that the reform of the slaughter-house
is at best a palliative, a temporary measure which will
mitigate, but cannot possibly amend, the horrors of
butchery; for it is but too evident that, under our complex
civilisation, when the town is so far aloof from the country,
and pastoralism can only be carried on in districts remote
from the busy crowded centres, it is impossible to transport
and slaughter vast numbers of large and highly sensitive
animals in a really humane manner. More barbarous, or
less barbarous, such slaughtering may undoubtedly be,
according to the methods employed, but the “humane”
slaughtering, so much bepraised of the sophist, is an
impossibility in fact and a contradiction in terms.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CONSISTENCY TRICK.
involves a vast amount of cruelty, a fact which cannot
be lessened or evaded by any quibbling subterfuges.
But, before we pass on to another phase of the food-
question, we must deal more fully with that very common
method of argument (alluded to in Chapter III.) which may
be called the Consistency Trick—akin to that known in
common parlance as the tu quoque or “you're another”—
the device of setting up an arbitrary standard of “consis-
tency,” and then demonstrating that the Vegetarian himself,
judged by that standard, is as “inconsistent ’’ as other
persons. Whether we plead guilty or not guilty to this
ingenious indictment, depends altogether on the meaning
assigned to the term “consistency.”
For, as anyone who tries to do practical work in the
world will rapidly discover, there is a true and there is a
false ideal of consistency. To pretend that in our complex
modern Society, where responsibilities are so closely inter-
woven, it is possible for any individual to cultivate “a
perfect character,” and stand like a Sir Galahad above his
fellows—this is the false ideal of consistency which it is the
first business of a genuine reformer to put aside ; for no
human being can do any solid work without frequently
convicting himself of inconsistencies when consistency is
stereotyped into a formula. On the other hand there is a
true duty of consistency, which regards the spirit rather
than the letter, and prompts us not to grasp foolishly at the
ideal, like a child crying for the moon, but to push steadily
towards the ideal by a faithful adherence to the right line
of reform, and by ever keeping in view the just proportion
and relative value of all moral actions. Let it be remem-
bered that it is this latter consistency alone that has any
interest for the Vegetarian. His purpose is not to exhibit
I' is certain, then, that the practice of flesh-eating
( 53 )
t;4 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
himself as a spotless Sir Galahad of food-reformers, but to
take certain practical steps towards the humanising of Our
barbarous diet system.
Herein will be found the answer to a class of questions
frequently put to Vegetarians, as to how they find it “con-
sistent with their principles” to use this or that form of
food or animal substance. It depends entirely on what
their principles are. If their aspirations were of the Sir
Galahad order, some of the “posers” would indeed be
formidable ; but as they do not aim at moral perfection,
but merely at rational progress, the charge of inconsistency
hurtles somewhat harmlessly over their heads. But here
let the Consistency Man have his say :
CONSISTENCY MAN : But what I want to know is this—how you
can think it consistent to use milk and eggs 2
VEGETARIAN : Consistent with what ?
CoNSISTENCY MAN : Why, with your own principles, of course.
VEGETARIAN : Or do you mean with your idea of my principles 2
The two things are not always identical, you know.
CoNSISTENCY MAN: You condemn flesh-eating because of the
-suffering it causes, but it seems to have escaped your notice that
the use of milk and eggs is also responsible for much. It is
strange that it has never occurred to you—
VEGETARIAN : My good sir, it has occurred to us years and
years ago. The question is as old as the movement itself. The
‘Cock-and-Bull argument, I presume 2
CONSISTENCY MAN : I ask, what would become of the cockerels
and bull-calves under a Vegetarian régime At present your
supply of milk and eggs is easy enough, because the young males
are killed and eaten by us carnivorous sinners. But are you not,
to a certain extent, participators in the deed :
VEGETARIAN: Yes, frankly, to a certain extent (a very limited
extent) I think we are. But what then
CoNSISTENCY MAN : What then | Why, then you are incon-
sistent, are you not ?
VEGETARIAN : In the strict sense of the word, certainly. But
so are all practical reformers. There is no such thing as strict
“consistency”—except in doing nothing.
CoNSISTENCY MAN : But if you are not consistent, ought you to
pose as moralists f
The Consistency Trick. 55
VEGETARIAN : We do not pose as moralists; that is your mis-
understanding of our principle. We advocate the disuse of flesh-
food as a barbarous form of diet, and we hold that Vegetarianism
is preferable on humane grounds; but we have never, claimed
that it is a perfect diet. We are content to get rid of the worst
evils first.
CONSISTENCY MAN : But is one sort of killing worse than
another ?
VEGETARIAN : Immeasurably worse. Even if it were necessary
under the vegetarian system, to destroy Some of the calves at
birth, as the superfluous young of domestic animals are now
destroyed, it would be ridiculous to compare such restricted
killing of new-born creatures with the present wholesale butchery
of full-grown and highly sentient animals in the slaughter-house.
CONSISTENCY MAN : You say “if” it were necessary, but is
there any doubt of it?
VEGETARIAN : It is not by any means so certain as you suppose
that the slaughter of calves would be unavoidable. Vegetarians
use milk sparingly—far more so than flesh-eaters—and a limited
amount of milk is obtainable without killing the calf, Nor is
there any reason, as Professor Newman has pointed out, why a
number of oxen should not be employed as formerly in working
the land. But I do not wish to take refuge in future possibilities.
I prefer to take the bull-calf argument “by the horns,” and admit
that, under present conditions, we are indirectly responsible.
Call it inconsistency, if you like. If it be inconsistency not to
postpone the abolition of the greater cruelties until we can also
abolish the minor ones, we are willing to be called inconsistent.
It may be noted, in passing, that the zeal with which
flesh-eaters urge this counter-charge of “inconsistency” is
designed, unconsciously perhaps, to hide an important
admission, viz., that where eggs and milk are used there is
no necessity for butchers' meat, or in other words that
Vegetarianism is a perfectly feasible diet. “Eggs and milk,”
says Dr. T. P. Smith (Fortnightly Review, November, 1895),
when objecting to their use by Vegetarians, “contain a
much larger quantity of nutritive material than an equal
amount of meat, for which, therefore, they may easily serve
as substitutes.” If this be granted, the rest is a mere
battle of words.
But the Cock-and-Bull argument, with which may be
linked the objection to the use of leather, is only one of
56 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
many departments of the Consistency Trick. Another
favourite method of convicting Vegetarians of inconsistency
is to start from the false assumption that Vegetarianism is
the same thing as Brahminism, and that any destruction of
even the lowliest forms of life is therefore reprehensible.
“As for the argument based on the cruelty of slaughter-
houses,” says Mr. W. T. Stead, “I don’t see that it bears
upon the question, unless you take the extreme Hindoo
doctrine as to the wickedness of taking sentient life, even
in the shape of lice and adders.” That is to say, the
terrible and quite unnecessary cruelties inflicted on the
most highly-organised and harmless animals in the cattle-
ship and slaughter-house do not even “bear upon'. She
morality of diet, unless we also abstain from killing the
most noxious and lowly-organised forms Of the same
nature is the foolish “when-you-drink-a-glass-of-water ’’
fallacy, which argues that, as we necessarily swallow
minute organisms in drinking, we need have no scruples as
to the needless butchery of a cow or a sheep. The savages
who in the good old times used to eat their grandfathers
and grandmothers might have justified their dietetic habits
on precisely similar grounds.
Nor is it only insects and “vermin’” on whose behalf the
Consistency Man is concerned, for plants also have life, and
therefore if the Vegetarian holds that “it is immoral to take
life” (which he does not), he must be inconsistent in eating
vegetables. I have already alluded, in Chapter VIII., to
Dr. Andrew Wilson's strange misunderstanding of the
vegetarian principle on this subject, but I must here
further quote a passage from the same instalment of his
“Science Jottings.” Note the triumphant tone of the un-
scientific scientist as he rushes to his absurd conclusion.
“I have not yet finished with the food-ſaddist. Suppose I find a
Vegetarian who, more consistent than the run of his fellows, will not
touch, taste, nor handle milk, eggs, cheese, or any animal product
whatever. I think it is still possible to show him that he is infringing
the code he lives by, in so far as its pretensions with the Sacredness of
life are concerned. Plants, no less than animals, are living things.
Their tissues contain living protoplasm, which is the essential physical
basis of life everywhere. . . . I am afraid that the consistent Vege-
tarian must no longer kill a cabbage, if he is to live up to the standard
of morals he sets up as a kind of fetish in his diet-regulations ; and to
lay low the lettuce, or pluck the apple from its bough, is really a direct.
The Consistency Trick. 57
infringement of the code which maintains that you have no right to kill
any living thing for food. Really this is a monstrous doctrine when
all is said and done.”—Illustrated London News, May I4th, I898.
It is a monstrous doctrine ; and what are we to think of
a man of science who attributes such absurdities to
Vegetarians, and thereupon holds them up to public
Contempt as inconsistent, when by making enquiry he
might at once have learnt that the blunder was on his own
side 2 Once more, then, be it stated that it is not the mere
“taking of life,” but the taking of life unnecessarily that the
Vegetarian deprecates, and that no criticism of Vege-
tarianism can be of any relevance if it ignores the fact that
all forms of life are not of equal value, but that the higher
the sensibility of the animal, and the closer his affinity to
ourselves, the stronger his claim on Our humaneness.
Before leaving this question of “consistency,” as affected
by the gradations of our duty of humaneness to animals, a few
words may be said on the practice of fish-eating. It has
been humorously suggested by Sir Henry Thompson
(Wineteenth Century, June, 1898), who, as I have proved in
the second chapter of this work, wrote in complete
ignorance of the facts and dates of the vegetarian move-
ment, that, as Vegetarians have “added" milk and eggs to
their diet since their Society was founded (a statement
quite devoid of truth), they may perhaps still further enlarge
their dietary so as to include fish. Here again Sir H.
Thompson has only shown his unfamiliarity with the
subject, for his novel proposition is in fact an old one,
which has been debated and rejected by the Vegetarian
Society in its adherence to its original rule of excluding fish,
flesh and fowl, and nothing else, from its dietary. So far,
then, as Organised Vegetarianism is concerned, those who
eat fish are not within the pale of membership ; but looked
at from the purely humane standpoint, it must be admitted
that there is an immense difference between flesh-eating
and fish-eating, and that those unattached food-reformers,
not few in number, who for humane reasons abstain from
flesh, but feel justified in eating fish, hold a perfectly
intelligible position. And I would further note that the
very fact of there having been some disposition, wise or
unwise, within the vegetarian ranks to recognise the com-
E
58 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
parative harmlessness of fish-eating, corroborates what I
have asserted throughout — that the raison d'être of
Vegetarianism has not been a pedantic hard-and-fast
crusade against “animal’ substances, but a practical desire
to abolish the horrors of the slaughter-house.
This, then, is our parting word to the professors of the
Consistency Trick. If they had charged us with the real
inconsistency, that is, with sacrificing the spirit to the letter
by overlooking graver cruelties while denouncing minor
ones, we should have been fully prepared to meet so serious
an accusation. But as they have not done this, but have
merely twitted us with not attempting everything at once,
and with allowing the subordinate evil to wait until the
central evil has been grappled with, we cheerfully admit
the impeachment—coming as it does (such is the humour
of the situation) from those who are themselves desirous of
perpetuating both kinds of suffering, the greater and the
smaller alike | We beg to assure them that we would much
rather be inconsistently humane than consistently cruel.
CHAPTER XII.
THE DEGRADATION OF THE BUTCHER.
kindness or unkindness to animals, for by the very
facts of the case it is a human question of no slight
importance, affecting as it does the social and moral
welfare of those more immediately concerned in it. Of all
recognised occupations by which, in civilised countries, a
livelihood is sought and obtained, the work which is
looked upon with the greatest loathing (next to the Hang-
man’s) is that of the Butcher—as witness the opprobrious
sense which the word “butcher” has acquired. Owing
to the instinctive horror of bloodshed which is charac-
teristic of all normal civilised beings, the trade of doing to
death countless numbers of inoffensive and highly organised
creatures, amid scenes of indescribable filth and ferocity,
is delegated to a pariah class of “slaughtermen,” who are
thus themselves made the victims of a grievous social wrong.
“I’m only doing your dirty work; it's such as you makes
such as us,” is said to have been the remark of a White-
chapel butcher to a flesh-eating gentleman who remon-
strated with him for his brutality; and the remark was a
perfectly just one. To demand a product which can only be
procured at the cost of the intense suffering of the animal,
and the deep degradation of the butcher, and by a process
which not one flesh-eater in a hundred would himself
under any circumstances perform, or even witness, is Con-
duct as callous, selfish and unsocial as could well be
imagined.
For butchery, as Sir Benjamin Richardson used to point
out, is essentially a “dangerous trade.” It not only
deadens and destroys the moral sympathies, but it has the
physical effect of straining the nerves and weakening the
heart of the slaughterman, and thus naturally induces a
tendency to have recourse to drink. How often, too, in read-
B"; this question of Butchery is not merely one of
( 59 )
6O The Logic of Vegetarianism.
ing of some murderous crime, has one seen it stated that
the criminal was a butcher; as, for instance, in the Austrian
“Ripper’ case, discovered in January last, when, as the
papers stated, a woman of the “unfortunate’’ class was
killed by a young butcher of herculean frame, by whom
it is supposed a previous victim had also been slaughtered.
To have accustomed oneself to a total disregard for the
pleading terror of sensitive animals, and to a murderous
use of the knife, is a terrible power for society to put into
the hands of its lowest and least responsible members.
The blame must ultimately fall on society itself, and not
on the individual slaughterman. No one had a better
knowledge of this subject than the late Mr. H. F. Lester,
author of “Behind the Scenes in Slaughter-houses,” and
this is his opinion :
“We must take into consideration the fact that the ranks of slaughter-
men are habitually made up from persons in whom one could hardly
expect to find the sentiment of pity strongly developed ; yet, even
among these, there is a certain air of dissatisfaction with the work they
are compelled to do, and a mixture of insolence and shamefacedness, of
Swagger and evident dislike of inspection, which makes one think they
know their trade is a nasty one, only bearable from lack of other
employment and from the good wages earned. But there are plenty of
men engaged in this work of killing animals for food who are much too
good for the business. These will tell you openly that they dislike the
job, but ‘people will have meat,’ and if they were to give it up, someone
else would step into the work.” *
Again, subordinate to the actual butchery, there are
Certain disgusting, if not dangerous occupations, such as
that of the women who work in the Deptford cattle market
at the malodorous task of “preparing animal entrails for
commercial uses,” of which process a revolting account was
given in the Daily Telegraph of July 19th, 1897. “The
women's share in the ugly business begins when the greasy
slimy intestinal skins come to them for the scraping off of
all fat and substance still attaching to them. They are
washed, twisted up, dressed with salt, and are ready for the
sausage makers, on whose behalf they have been thus pre-
pared.” The journalistic comment is that, “In an ideal
world men would not permit women to do work from which
every instinct of refinement and even decency shrinks,” but
that all is over-ruled by “the demands of present-day cheap-
ness.” This, as things go, is undeniable ; but it would be
... The Degradation of the Butcher. 61
well that conscientious flesh-eaters should at least realise
what their diet imposes on other people.
That, however, is just what they are mostly determined
not to realise, doubtless from a sub-conscious apprehension
that if once they begin to look into this unsavoury subject
they may be pushed to the verge of certain awkward con-
clusions. Nothing is more significant than the extreme
unwillingness of philanthropists and members of ethical
Societies, who debate almost every problem under the sun,
to give serious attention to the question of Butchery—a
reluctance which may be taken as one of the strongest
possible tributes to the pertinence of Vegetarianism. This
is said to be especially true of the philanthropists of
Chicago, that great centre of the killing-trade. “No one
who goes to Chicago,” says a writer in the New Age
(Nov. 25th, 1897), “should fail to see the shambles. They
are the most wicked things in creation. They are sickening
beyond description. The men in them are more brutes
than the animals they slaughter. Missions and institutes
have been built in the respectable parts of the city from
the profits, and the employées of the shambles have been
left to go straight down to the devil. . . . It is the duty
of everyone interested in social questions, of everyone
whose demands necessitate this kind of labour, to wade
through this filth to see these poor wretches at work.”
The question thus arises, with regard to the degradation
of the butcher, Where are the philanthropists 2
PHILANTHROPIST : Where are we ? Why, here we are, of
course ! Busy at our life-work of helping and elevating our
fellow-beings. Doing good is our profession, you know. What
do you want with me 2
VEGETARIAN: I want you to consider the case of the slaughter-
II.1011.
PHILANTHROPIST: Ah, the slaughtermen Yes, certainly, I
will think what can be done for the slaughtermen. But to-day I
am just off to lay the first stone of my new great Reformatory for
Moral Delinquents. I must be going.
VEGETARIAN : Then to-morrow, perhaps, we might have a talk
on the conditions of work in slaughter-houses 2
PHILANTHROPIST : No, unfortunately ; to-morrow is the open-
62 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
ing day of the Home for Inebriates. And the next day, the
annual meeting of the Society for Beautifying the Houses of the
Poor.
VEGETARIAN: Would it not be more philanthropic to beautify
those other Houses of which I speak—the most hideous Houses
of all !
PHILANTHROPIST : You must pardon me, my friend; I am an
over-worked man. I am doing the great things of life, and must
leave you to do the Small ones.
VEGETARIAN : The great things | That is just what I want you
to do. I ask you to lay the foundation-stone of the greatest
Reformatory of all—the reform of one's self.
PHILANTHROPIST : You are enigmatical, sir. I do not under-
Stand you. p
VEGETARIAN : Then I will be explicit. You are simply wasting
your time and money on this reformation of others, unless you
also set about reforming your own habits.
PHILANTHROPIST : I must decline to discuss such matters. It
is my principle not to let my left hand know what my right hand
doeth.
VEGETARIAN : Exactly ; and the result is that you are undoing
with one hand the good that you are doing with the other. You
try to reform criminals and reclaim drunkards, yet by your own
manner of diet you are degrading those who do your butcher's
work below the level of humanity. You spend money on
beautifying the houses of the poor, while you daily purchase the
products of the slaughter-house, which is a plague-spot of foulness
and demoralisation to the whole district around it.
PHILANTHROPIST : I must protest, sir. A man's diet is a private
matter between himself and his God.
VEGETARIAN : But what if his God be his belly
PHILANTHROPIST : It is no concern of yours. This interference
of vegetarian agitators in the privacy of the English home is
most objectionable to my feelings. Live and let live, is my motto.
VEGETARIAN : It happens to be mine too, so let us talk it out.
Your principle is to “let live,” you say. Then why do a vast
butchery-business by proxy
PHILANTHROPIST : I wish you good morning, sir. My pro-
fession, as I told you, is that of Doing good, and I must strictly
adhere to it. I go to lay the first stone of my Reformatory for
Moral Delinquents.
The Degradation of the Butcher. 63
And so they go their ways, the philanthropist to build
“Homes,” the ethical folk to talk learnedly, and the social
reformer to concoct schemes for the amelioration of the
human race. Yet, meantime, these very persons are them-
selves perpetuating, by their mode of living, the evil
conditions which they profess to be anxious to remove,
and condemning the pariah slaughterman to a life of sheer
bestiality. “The meat-eater,” says Mr. Lester, “accepts
the results of this man’s demoralization of character.
Pious and professed Christians are content to allow the
deep degradation of the nature of a whole class of men,
set apart to do the nation's dirty work of slaughtering,
without an apparent thought of the baseness of their
conduct.”
Here, as I said at the Outset, is a distinctively human
question, and one which cannot be evaded, even by those
slippery reasoners who would shuffle out of the duty of
humaneness to animals by pretending (in the face of
evolutional science) that there is no bond of consanguinity
between the animals and mankind. By no possible
sophistry can “educated ” people be justified in placing
this heavy burden of butchery on the hands of their social
“inferiors.” The vivisector and the sportsman have at
least the courage to do their own devilries; and the work
even of the hardened agents of “murderous millinery"
and the fur-trade is diversified to some extent by travel and
adventure. But the slaughterman’s task is one of un-
relieved, unmitigated brutality, involving the constant
and systematic doing of deeds that are inhuman in them-
selves, degrading to the rough men who do them, and
trebly disgraceful to the polite ladies and gentlemen at
whose behest they are done.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE AESTHETIC ARGUMENT.
aesthetic argument, the two being in fact twin
branches of the same stem. For “humane,” as the
Latin shows, has the double meaning of “gentle”
and “refined ’’; so that “humanity,” in the original con-
ception of the term, implies not only a moral regard for the
rights of our fellow-beings, but also an aesthetic apprecia-
tion of what is beautiful and pure. Culture and good-
breeding, together with justice and compassion, are the
characteristics of a humane man ; and the fact that this
two-fold sense of the word has been well-nigh forgotten in
the education of the modern “gentleman,” may serve to
explain why there is often such a grievous lack of gentle-
ness in persons who claim to be refined. Our literae
humaniores are a mere academic course of book-learning,
the humane element being altogether left out of account;
and to such bathos has this divorce of gentleness and
refinement carried us that, in some quarters, a “professor
of humanity” is—a teacher of Latin grammar.
We are prepared, then, to find that the aesthetic or
artistic faculty of the present day is deplorably narrow in
its scope, and is so ignorant of the true relationship of
humanity and art that it actually prides itself on omitting
from its ken all humane considerations, while it diligently
searches for the beautiful and the picturesque, as if beauty
were a thing detached from the realities of every-day life
The bare idea that there is an aesthetic side to the diet
question, beyond the mere delicacies of cookery and
embellishments of the dining-table, would be scouted as
ridiculous by ninety-nine out of a hundred of our artists or
literary men ; for the very force of habit which has made
them so quick to resent the least technical flaw in their
special departments of work, has left them blindly in-
G LOSELY connected with the humane argument is the
( 64 )
The AEsthetic Argument. 65
different to the hideous and revolting aspects of flesh-
eating. To these aesthetes, so-called, the sight of an
ugly house, for example, is a sore trouble and grievance ;
but the slaughter-house, with all its gruesome doings, is a
matter of supreme unconcern—nay rather, a thing to be
indirectly patronised and defended. I have known a case
where an aesthetic lady, of great personal culture, and the
centre of a polished circle, stained the floor of her charm-
ing suburban villa with bullocks' blood brought from the
shambles in a bucket.
Yet the aesthete does not usually vindicate his carniv-
orous diet and its appurtenances with the old unhesitating
heartiness of the barbarian ; he is a bit ashamed of
himself—unconsciously, perhaps—in these latter days,
even as the cannibal is ashamed, for all his show of beads
and feathers, when the discussion turns upon “long pig.”
Like all the apologists of flesh-eating, in their respective
spheres, he is shifty and evasive in his defences, and is not
too proud, in his moment of extremity, to have recourse
to the “consistency trick,” and to try to trip up his
vegetarian persecutor with the retort of “You’re another.”
From which signs of grace it may be surmised that the
aesthete, in spite of his brave exterior, is not quite at ease
in his dietetic philosophy, and that the products of
Butchery are, in a very real sense, the “skeleton in the
cupboard ” (the larder cupboard) of Literature and Art,
AESTHETE : Pray, why do you address yourself to me in that
significant manner
VEGETARIAN : Because I understand that you cultivate the
artistic sense. You love to have beautiful things about you, do
you not ? So you must needs wish to be a Vegetarian.
AESTHETE : I love beautiful things, certainly. Art is my
vocation. But what has Vegetarianism to do with it 2
VEGETARIAN : Have the arrangements of the dinner table
nothing to do with it—the cloth, the silver, the glasses, the
dessert, the flowers ?
AESTHETE : A great deal, obviously. There is much art in
dining well.
VEGETARIAN : Yet the dishes that are served at the table have
nothing to do with it ! Is not that rather contradictory 2
66 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
AESTHETE : I did not say that. The cookery is an essential
point, of course.
VEGETARIAN: But what of the meat—the thing cooked *
What is it? What was it And how did it come to be on your
plate 2
AESTHETE : Oh, I never think of such questions. So long as it
is nice, I am content. It must satisfy my taste, that is all.
VEGETARIAN : But are you sure that it does satisfy your taste
in the same way that other things do 2 I think not, for you have
never put it to the trial. In no other branch of art do you take
things wholly on trust, but you try them by the standard of an
independent and educated intelligence. In diet, and in diet only,
you “shut your eyes and open your mouth,” as the children say,
and never distinguish between a real innate liking, and the liking
that is merely traditional. The result is that, so far from being
“aesthetic” in diet, you are an eater of the most nauseous messes,
a philistine of the grossest type.
AESTHETE: Thank you ; I am the best judge of that. De
gustibus non est disputandum.
VEGETARIAN : About genuine tastes, I admit, disputation is
idle. But the proverb is not true of the sham tastes to which I
refer. There is a great deal to be discussed about them.
AESTHETE : But I assure you, my friend, my liking for a ham-
sandwich is a genuine taste.
VEGETARIAN : With full knowledge of the pig-sty and the pig-
sticker. Do not the antecedents of your ham-Sandwich cause
you a feeling of disgust 7
AESTHETE : Oh, well, if you persist in thinking about it, all
feeding causes disgust. Don't you think there is something
gross in the whole process of ingestion ?
VEGETARIAN : Then why not gorge on carrion at once 2 The
moment you adopt the “in for a penny in for a pound” attitude,
you sacrifice the whole art of living.
AESTHETE : But what of the processes on which Vegetarianism
itself depends? You talk of the filth of the slaughter-house ; but
how about the filth of market-gardening 2 To watch the soil
being manured, if we let our thoughts dwell upon it, is enough to
spoil all appetite for the produce of the garden. The more
delicious the asparagus or the strawberries, the more we ought to
loathe them.
VEGETARIAN : There I disagree with you entirely. There is
nothing in the least disgusting, to me, at any rate (and I speak
The AEsthetic Argument. 67.
from personal experience), in the manuring of the soil or in any
agricultural process—on the contrary, there is much that is.
wholesome and cheering in this chemistry of nature. The
healthy mind takes a delight in gardening, just as it regards .
slaughtering with abhorrence. If you want to see the contrast
between the effects of the two professions on those who practise
them, compare the face of the typical slaughterman with that of
the typical gardener. It is as remarkable as the contrast.
between a butcher's and a fruiterer's shop.
AESTHETE : Well, it is no use talking about it; our views of
life are different. You are a social reformer and agitator, and
agitation is fatal to the tranquillity of art. I am an artist, and do
not care a straw for social reform. My Creed is expressed in
Keats's couplet:—
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
VEGETARIAN: Yes, but it is possible that Keats's meaning is.
somewhat deeper than you imagine. It is not your Creed that I
quarrel with, but your own misunderstanding and misuse of it.
That the oneness of truth and beauty is knowledge sufficient, I
admit ; but my complaint is that you do not really know it, and
therefore I regard your aestheticism—the aestheticism that makes
clean the outside of the cup and the platter, and the outside only
—as mere vandalism in masquerade.
Nor is even the outside of the aesthetic platter free
from offence, for there is nothing more hideous to the eye
(not to mention the mind) than the “scorched corpses,” as
Bernard Shaw calls them, that are displayed on polite
dinner-tables when the dish-covers are removed. “Among
the customs at table that deserve to be abolished,” wrote
Leigh Hunt, “is that of serving up dishes that retain a
look of life in death—codfish with their staring eyes, hares
with their hollow countenances, &c. It is in bad taste, an
incongruity, an anomaly; to say nothing of its effect on
morbid imaginations.” Perhaps, however, the most
morbid imagination, or lack of imagination, is that of the
persons who are not disgusted by these ugly sights.
Art and humanity, then, are but two branches of the same
stock : the true humanist and the true artist are own
brethren. To the artistic temperament, in particular,
Vegetarianism has the surest right of appeal ; for the
aestheticism which can prate of truth and beauty, while it.
68 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
battens like a ghoul on bloodshed and suffering, has
abnegated its own principles, and has ceased to be artistic.
How would it be possible for the scenes that are hourly
enacted in slaughter-houses to be tolerated for a moment in
a community which had any real artistic consciousness 2
Yet what “aesthetic ’’ protest, except from Vegetarians, is
ever raised against them P Take for example the following
extract from some recently published notes descriptive of
the Chicago meat factories :—
“Slithered over bloody floor. Nearly broke neck in gore of old
porker. Saw few hundred men slicing pigs, making hams, Sausages,
and pork chops. Whole sight not edifying ; indeed, rather beastly.
INext went to cattle-killing house. Cattle driven along gangway and
banged over head with iron hammer. Fell stunned ; then swung up
by legs, and man cuts throats. Small army of men with buckets
catching blood ; it gushed over them in torrents—a bit sickening. Next
to sheep slaughter-house. More throat-cutting—ten thousand sheep
killed a day—more blood. Place reeks with blood ; walls and floor
splashed with it; air thick, warm, offensive. ‘Yes,’ said guide,
“Armour’s biggest slaughter-place in the world. There's no waste ;
we utilise everything—everything except the squeak of the pigs. We
can't can that.' Went and drank brandy.” "
It is much to be regretted that it is not found possible,
in this enterprising establishment, to “can " the squeak, as
well as the flesh, of the pig; for such a phonographic
effect might suggest certain novel thoughts to the refined
ladies and gentlemen who contentedly regale themselves
on ham-Sandwiches at polite supper-tables. For imagine
what the result would be, in studio and boudoir, dining-
room and drawing-room, if the death-cries of the
slaughter-house could be but once uncanned and repro-
duced “The groans and screams of this poor persecuted
race,” as De Quincey said of cats, “if gathered into some
great echoing hall of horrors, would melt the heart of the
stoniest.” But far vaster and more impressive would be
the world-wide hall of horrors which should contain the
bitter cry of the victims of the butcher. Would that it
were possible thus to compel the aesthetic flesh-eater to
“face the music ’’ of his misdeeds !
And remember, it is not only at big slaughtering-centres
* From a series of letters contributed to the Nottingham Guardian by
Mr. Fraser, during a cycling tour round the world.
The Aºsthetic Azgument. 69
that these ugly trades are carried on, nor are they there,
perhaps, at their ugliest; but every town and every village
has its private torture-dens where the same carnage is
performed the year round on a smaller scale and in a
clumsier manner, and everywhere the butcher's shop
presents the same ghastly spectacle of quartered carcases
hanging a-row, and gloated Over by “shopping ” women.
One would think it incredible that any lover of the
beautiful could doubt that the national sense of beauty
must be seriously impaired by these disgusting and
degrading sights. But enough of the subject I Were we
to dwell too long on it, we should be tempted to exclaim,
as was said of another kind of iniquity, “While these
things are being done, beauty stands veiled, and music is a
screeching lie l’’
CHAPTER XIV.
THE HYGIENIC ARGUMENT.
are constantly described by the advocates of flesh-
eating as “sentimental,” and if it be sentimental to
have regard for the sufferings of animals and the
'beauty of Our Own surroundings, the charge will be gladly
admitted ; but there is also, independent of all considera-
tions of humanity, a distinctly hygienic movement towards
the disuse of flesh-food, on the ground that such diet is not
only barbarous but unwholesome. In Germany, especially,
the system of “natural living ” has attracted much atten-
tion, and the propaganda of food-reform is there mainly
on those lines; in England less so, but here too there are
a number of Vegetarians who are hygienists first and
humanitarians afterwards, and all humanitarians are to
Some extent hygienists, so that it is ridiculous, in any
serious criticism of Vegetarianism, to leave out of sight, as
our opponents commonly do, this essential part of the
system. There is, in fact, a considerable scientific litera-
ture on the subject, a train of thought and experience
handed down from Cornaro and Gassendi, through
their successors Cheyne, Hartley, Lambe, Abernethy, and
others, to such modern authorities as Sir Benjamin
Richardson and Dr. Alexander Haig ; yet so little known
is this testimony that it might be imagined, from the
nervous apprehension with which the abandonment of
flesh-food is regarded, that Vegetarianism were some new
and hazardous experiment, whereon he who enters carries
his life in his hands ! This ignorance of the long-standing
claim of Vegetarianism to a scientific basis is the result of
the indifference and prejudice that have always made
dietetics the most unpopular of studies, those who are in
health not caring to give more than a passing thought to
the hygienic quality of their food, while those who are
Tº: humane and the aesthetic aspects of Vegetarianism
( 7o )
The Hygzemic Argument. 71
sick are naturally suspicious of change or overruled by
medical advisers.
VALETUDINARIAN: Well, what is this dietetic system you recom-
mend me 2 I have come to the point where I am disposed to try
anything that promises relief.
VEGETARIAN : The system I recommend you is the vegetable
and milk diet, known as Vegetarianism.
VALETUDINARIAN : Vegetarianism | But I thought that was
practised for moral and sentimental reasons, to avoid killing
animals 2
VEGETARIAN: Yes, certainly it is, but what then 2
VALETUDINARIAN: You forget that I have no feeling of that
sort. I should not care how many animals were cut up, if it
would save me from indigestion. To my mind the highest
morality is to keep oneself in good health, and not to trouble
about animals.
VEGETARIAN: Well, let us leave the animals out of the
question. I recommend you to give up flesh-eating for your own
sake. You didn't suppose that Vegetarianism was all for the Sake
of the animals f
VALETUDINARIAN : On what, then, do you found your theory of
diet P
VEGETARIAN: On the fact that flesh-food is in itself a stimu-
lant, and that incidentally it is very liable to transmit
disease. Vegetarianism, on the Contrary, is a simple, natural, less
inflammatory diet, which from the earliest times has been known
and practised by a few wise persons as containing the secret of
right living. I strongly advise you to give it a trial.
VALETUDINARIAN : On no account I dare not play any
pranks with my health.
VEGETARIAN : But your health, by your own showing, is a
minus quantity. And think of the risks you are running now—
tuberculosis, trichinosis, anthrax, pleuro-pneumonia—you don't
know what you may be imbibing with your flesh-meat
VALETUDINARIAN: Oh, well, that is a mere matter of improved
inspection.
VEGETARIAN : But it may be many years before slaughter-
houses are properly inspected, and, as you know, there is nothing
that can be called inspection at present. What of your health
meanwhile 7
VALETUDINARIAN : But what could I find to live on if I
72 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
adopted Vegetarianism I can't eat potatoes, and I dislike
cabbages.
VEGETARIAN : Pray drop the “live-on-cabbage” fallacy once
for all ! Vegetarians do not live on cabbages or potatoes, seeing
that they have an inexhaustible variety of wholesome foods to
choose from—the cereals, the pulses, fresh fruits, dried fruits,
nuts, garden vegetables, and (if they will) eggs, milk and cheese.
VALETUDINARIAN : But don't Vegetarians feel very weak 2
VEGETARIAN : Did it look like it in the late walking-race in
Germany, or in the contests won by the Vegetarian Cycling Club
in England and India Come now you admit that your health
is not what it should be. Let me put you on a vegetarian diet.
VALETUDINARIAN : It is very kind of you, but I have a wife
and family to provide for. If it were not for them I might be
willing to make a change, but as it is I feel it a solemn duty to
continue to eat meat for the sake of others.
VEGETARIAN : Ah, certainly, if you have come to that point
your case is beyond recovery Altruistic flesh-eating is a
pathological condition for which there is no cure.
The moment impartial enquiry is made into the com-
parative perils and benefits of the two modes of living,
certain undeniable facts begin to appear, of which the
first and most obvious, though not the most important,
perhaps, are the incidental dangers of flesh-eating. Many
indeed, and unsuspected by the ordinary man who takes a
“good meat dinner,” are the ills that flesh is heir to,
especially in the diet of the poor; for, as Professor F. W.
Newman has pointed out, “where the population is dense,
the poorer classes, if they eat flesh-meat at all, are sure to
get a sensible portion of their supply in an unwholesome
state.” This assertion is no mere piece of vegetarian
polemics; it rests on the authority of more than one Royal
Commission, the latest of which has insisted, in the
Tuberculosis Report of 1898, that “so long as private
slaughter-houses are permitted to exist, so long must in-
spection be carried out under conditions incompatible with
efficiency.” There is in fact no genuine inspection of the
meat killed in private slaughter-houses, nor is the case (at
present) much better in public ones, and it is notorious
that a large amount of tuberculous flesh, examined and re-
jected under their more careful scrutiny by the Jews, is
The Hygienic Azgument. 73
thought good enough to be sold for the use of the
“Gentiles.” It would be easy to quote official figures to
show the prevalence of the mischief, but it is not
necessary here to do so because the facts are not denied.”
Thc cause of the disease thus prevalent among cattle
must be sought partly in the excessive demand for flesh
food, and the consequent high price of meat, which is
a great temptation to graziers to breed from immature
stock ; partly, too, in the unhealthy system of stall-
feeding and cramming, and last but not least in the
rough treatment to which animals are exposed during
their transit by sea and rail—an evil which is recog-
nised by butchers no less than by humanitarians. More-
over, in addition to the dangers which flesh-eaters incur
of diseases contagious and parasitic, there is the risk of
eating decomposed meat under the title of “table
delicacies.” Here, as one instance out of many, is an
extract from a London daily paper of October 21st, 1898.
“Some exemplary fines were inflicted when summonses connected
with the seizure of thirteen tons of rotten pigs' livers came on for hear-
ing. A Company-promoter, trading as manufacturer of table delicacies,
was fined £Ioo, including costs, for the possession of forty-four barrels
of the livers, which were deposited for the purpose of being converted
into human food in the shape of meat-extracts, soups, and other table
delicacies. The Magistrate characterised the condemned goods as
absolute filth.”
The bearing of such facts on the public health is obvious.
“The shocking revelations,” says Reynolds' Newspaper
(March 19th, 1899), “recently made as to the potted meat
trade of London, clearly give us the key-note to the
terrible weekly statistics of fevers and other diseases in the
poorer districts of London and big towns generally. Putrid
sheep's hearts—putrid meat of unknown origin—anything
from horse to pug dog—slimy livers, reeking lights that
would poison even a Fleet Street cat, and moribund hams
from diseased pigs are the foundation of our table delica-
cies. Ugh it is enough to make a man forswear anything
‘potted' for ever.”
But though these and similar facts are indisputable, and
* See the official facts and figures cited in “Tuberculosis,” by Dr. J.
Oldfield, 1892.
F
74. The Logic of Vegetarianism.
though so great an authority as Sir B. W. Richardson has
stated that, “in respect to the propagation of disease, it
seems just to declare that the danger is much less and
much more easily preventable on the vegetarian than on
the animal diet,” the flesh-eaters, strong or weak as they
may happen to be, even to the sickliest valetudinarian that
ever Sipped his Liebig, are much more afraid of being
infected with vegetarian principles than with the poisons
of the murdered Ox, and would venture on every drug in
the pharmacopoeia rather than on a pure and simple diet.
Yet more than a hundred and fifty years ago so eminent a
physician as Dr. George Cheyne, then in a hale old age,
had written as follows in his “Author's Case ’’:—
“My regimen at present is milk, with tea, coffee, bread and butter,
mild cheese, salads, fruits and seeds of all kinds, with tender roots (as
potatoes, turnips, Carrots), and, in short, everything that has not life,
dressed or not, as I like, in which there is as much or a greater variety
than in animal foods, so that the stomach need never be cloyed. I
drink no wine nor any fermented liquors, and am rarely dry, most of
my food being liquid, moist or juicy. Only after dinner I drink either
coffee or green tea, but seldom both in the same day, and sometimes a
glass of soft small cider. The thinner my diet, the easier, more
cheerful and lightsome I find myself; my sleep is also the sounder,
though perhaps somewhat shorter than formerly under my full animal
diet ; but then I am more alive than ever I was.”
The close connection of Vegetarianism with temperance,
simplicity, and general hardihood has been discovered
by many thousands of persons since Dr. Cheyne re-
corded it, and has had its latest illustration in the doings
of the Vegetarian Cycling Club, whose remarkable achieve-
ments have shown once more that flesh-eating is not by any
means a necessary condition of athletic prowess. It cannot
be mere accident that Vegetarians are almost invariably ab-
stainers from alcohol and tobacco, that, man for man, they
eat more sparingly, dress more lightly, live more naturally,
and work harder than flesh-eaters, and are far less subject
to illnesses and ailments. It is notorious that in quite a
number of diseases, especially those of the gouty class, a
vegetarian diet is prescribed by medical men, who
use for cure what they scorn to use for prevention.
In the works of Dr. Alexander Haig,” the most
* Uric Acid as a Factor in the Causation of Disease. Diet and Foods
Considered in Relation to Strength and Power of Endurance, I898.
The Hygienic Argument. 75
recent exponent of reformed diet, a close study has
been made of the comparative wholesomeness and un-
wholesomeness of vegetable and animal foods, and to these
writings, together with those of the other authorities above-
mentioned, I would refer any of my readers who may be
under the idea that Vegetarianism has no medical support.
The doctors, of course, or those of them who study the
history of their own profession, are well aware of the
hollowness of this common superstition, but it suits their
purpose to let an ignorant public fondly hug the belief that
Vegetarianism is a mere “fad,” a mushroom growth born
of the follies and sentimentalities of a decadent and hyper-
civilized age.
It is impossible in the limit of these pages, which are
concerned with the logical not the medical view of Vege-
tarianism, to discuss with any fulness the argument based
on hygiene ; but it may be stated as a matter, not of
opinion, but of knowledge, that in the judgment of Vege-
tarians, quite apart from all humane bias, there is a strong
case for the reformed regimen on the ground of its health-
fulness alone, and that a scientific statement of this case
may be found, by those who care to become acquainted
with the facts, in the published writings of a small but not
inconsiderable succession of medical authorities. Humanity
and Hygiene are the twin deities of food-reform, and their
paths, though separate for the time, converge eventually
to the same vegetarian goal.
CHAPTER XV.
F LESH - MEAT AND MORALS.
German proverb. The body is built up of the
food-stuffs which it assimilates, and it is reason-
able to suppose that diet has thus a determining
influence on character. If this be true, the reflection is
not a pleasant one for the flesh-eater. “Animal food,” it
has been said, “containing as it does highly-wrought
organic forces, may liberate within our system powers
which we may find it difficult or even impossible to domi-
nate—lethargic monsters, foul harpies, and sad-visaged
lemures—which may insist on having their own way,
building up an animal body not truly human.” ”
But here the idealist steps in with a different theory.
Man is not what he eats, but what he thinks and feels;
it is not what we eat, but how we eat, that most vitally
affects us. This is well expressed in one of Thoreau's
daring paradoxes : “There is a certain class of unbelievers
who sometimes ask me such questions as if I think I can
live on vegetable food alone ; and to strike at the root of
the matter at once—for the root is faith——I am accustomed
to answer such, that I can live on board-nails. If the
cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that
I have to say.”
There is, however, no real antagonism between these
two theories, for both may be to a great extent true, though
neither wholly so. If mind affects matter, matter also
affects mind ; if spirit acts on food, food in its turn reacts
on spirit. The one truth that stands out clearly from a
consideration of this subject, and from the witness of
common experience, is that a gross animal diet is inimical
to the finer instincts, and that, as Thoreau says, “every
man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or
"M". is what he eats,” says the materialist in the
* Edward Carpenter, “Health a Conquest.”
( 76 )
Flesh-Meat and Morals. 77
more poetic faculties in the best condition, has been par-
ticularly inclined to abstain from animal food.” Plain
living and high thinking are indissolubly connected.
Vegetarianism, as I have already shown, is not asceticism,
but if it offer the moral advantages of asceticism without
the drawbacks, is not that in its favour 2
But there is a tendency among certain “psychical”
authorities of the present day to eschew the vegetarian
doctrine as itself “materialistic,” and as attributing too
much importance to the mere bodily functions of eating
and digesting. “What does it matter about our diet,”
they say, “whether it be animal or vegetable, flesh or
fruit, so long as the spirit in which we seek it be a fit and
proper one P The question of food is one for doctors to
decide ; ’tis they who are concerned with the body, while
we are concerned with the soul.” I wish to show that
this reasoning is nothing but a piece of charlatanry, and
rests upon a perversion of the philosophy that it claims
to represent. --
For though it is true, in a sense, that spirit can Sanctify
diet, it is not true, as assumed by these spiritual body-
snatchers, that a general sanction is thereby given to any
diet whatsoever, no matter what cruelties may be caused
by it, or who it be that causes them. We may grant that
SO long as no scruple has arisen concerning the morality of
flesh-eating, or any other barbarous usage, such practices
may be carried on in innocence and good faith, and there-
fore without personal demoralisation to those who indulge
in them. But from the moment when discussion begins,
and an unconscious act becomes a conscious or semi-Con-
scious one, the case is wholly different, and it is then
impossible to plead that “it does not matter” about one's
food. On the contrary, it is a matter of vital import if
injustice be deliberately practised. To use flesh - food
unwittingly, by Savage instinct, as the Carnivora do, or, like
barbarous mankind, in the ignorance of age-long habit, is
one thing; but it is quite another thing for a rational
person to make a sophistical defence of such habits when
their iniquity has been displayed, and then to claim that he
is absolved from guilt by the spirit in which he acted. The
spirit that absolves is one of unquestioning faith, not of
78 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
far-fetched sophistry. The wolf devours the lamb, and is
no worse a wolf for it; but if he seek, as in the fable, to
give quibbling excuses for his wolfishness, he becomes a
byword for hypocrisy. Our Psychic Philosopher, in truth,
is a wolf in sheep's clothing—a Carnalist in psychical
disguise.*
PSYCHIC PHILOSOPHER: Why all this fuss about Vegetarianism
and what we eat P With the best intention, no doubt, you regard
the matter from too low a plane. Has not the greatest of teachers
himself told us that “Not that which goeth into the mouth
defileth a man ; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this
defileth a man” P
VEGETARIAN: You know well that the text has not the meaning
you put on it. It could as logically be made to excuse any
Swinishness whatsoever. Flesh-eating is not a mere ceremonial
question of eating “with unwashen hands,” as that referred to
in the text, but one that involves the gravest issues of right-
doing and wrong-doing.
PSYCHIC PHILOSOPHER: But to the pure all things are pure.
VEGETARIAN : Possibly—if we know who are the pure. But
the mere eating of impurities is scarcely proof sufficient.
PSYCHIC PHILOSOPHER: I cannot take your view of the
importance of this question. To me, as to the Indian yogis, the
choice of food is a matter of indifference.
VEGETARIAN: I doubt if your butcher's bills would bear out
that assertion. If food is one of the “indifferent” things, why do
you hold fast to your butcher's meat like a Snarling dog to his
bone 2
PSYCHIC PHILOSOPHER: I maintain that it is the world, the
flesh and the devil, that we have to fight; not the slaughter-house.
That is a trifle by comparison.
VEGETARIAN : Yes, I know your school of thought. You would
place the world and the devil under a ban, but the flesh under a
dish-cover. Unfortunately their triple alliance is too compact
for separation. Where the flesh-food is, the worldliness and the
devilry will not be far removed.
It will be objected, no doubt, that the injurious effect of
* It is a curious fact that the Greek word psychic had the double sense
of spiritual and carnal. See Tertullian's treatise, “Against the Carnal-
Minded ” (Psychicos).
Flesh-Meat and Morals. 79
flesh-food on morals has never been scientifically proved,”
nor indeed is it possible that absolute proof should be
forthcoming until Vegetarianism is widely enough practised
to furnish data for comparison ; there are, however, certain
very marked indications that can hardly be overlooked.
In the first place, as already stated, there is the im-
memorial belief, especially prominent in the usage of
monastic orders, but scarcely less so in all systems of
hygienic or spiritual exercise—amounting in short to a
practical consensus of mankind—that a stimulating or
excessive diet is harmful to sobriety and self-control ;
as evidenced by the far greater amount of crime rife among
luxurious town-dwellers than among frugal peasants.
Secondly, there is the fact, too well attested to be
challenged, that flesh-eating and alcoholism are closely
allied, and that the drink-crave dies a natural death when
a stimulating diet is withdrawn ; from which it may be
further realised that the excitation caused by flesh-food
must necessarily, in many cases, act injuriously on the
nerve-system and contribute powerfully to the vicious
habits which moralists deplore.
“The deepest, truest, and most general causes of prosti-
tution in all great cities,” says Dr. Anna Kingsford, f “must
be looked for in the luxurious and intemperate habits of
eating and drinking prevalent among the rich and well-to-
do. The chief element of this luxury is the use of flesh
and alcohol, which mistaken notions of hygiene and
therapeutics tend to press more and more upon all classes
of men and women. Abolish kreophagy and its Com-
panion vice, alcoholism, and more, a thousandfold, will be
done to abolish prostitution than can be achieved by any
other means soever as long as these two evil influences
flourish. The young man of the present day, accustomed
from childhood to frequent and copious meals of flesh,
and from early youth to the use of all manner of fermented
* Even cannibalism—such is the complexity of the human character—
is not always directly demoralising. “This unnatural practice,” says
Captain Burrows in his Land of the Pigmies, I899, “stands by itself,
seeming not in any way to affect or retard the development of the
better emotions.”
+ The Perfect Way in Diet, p. 59.
8O The Logic of Vegetarianism.
beverages and liqueurs, carries about with him and fosters
an increasingly disordered appetite, which not infrequently
assumes the character of true disease.”
The evils of a stimulating diet in the case of the young
have been emphasised by such well-known authorities as
Dr. George Keith and Sir B. W. Richardson. Here is a
significant passage from the writings of the former —
“I have done much for many years privately, whenever I had the
opportunity, to impress on fathers and mothers the danger to their sons
and daughters from exciting prematurely their natural desires and
passions ; but custom and fashion have so powerful a hold, especially
in the higher circles of society, that I have frequently had to feel that
my efforts were in vain. . . . The existence of bad habits at Schools
is well known to the masters, and they take what measures they can
for their prevention. Even when they know the truth, the strength of
custom and habit so imperatively demands a full diet for the growing
youth that they are obliged to fall in with the customs of the day. But
few of them are aware of the main cause of the evil, and the last thing
most would dream of as a remedy is a simpler diet.”
So, too, Dr. B. W. Richardson in his “ Foods for Man”:
“In all my long medical career, extending over forty years, I have
rarely known a case in which a child has not preferred fruit to animal
food. I say it without the least prejudice, as a lesson learnt from
simple experience, that the most natural diet for the young, after the
natural milk diet, is fruit and wholemeal bread, with milk and water
for drink. The desire for this same mode of sustenance is often Con-
tinued into after years, as if the resort to flesh were a forced and artifi-
cial feeding, which required long and persistent habit to establish its
permanency as a part of the system of every-day life.”
Contrast with this wise and weighty advice the dietetic
habits actually prevalent among the youth of Our well-to-do
classes, where we see not only a strong tendency to Over-
eating, but a rooted and active conviction that flesh is the
suinínum bonuin of food. The fatted calf is rivalled by the
fatted schoolboy ; the cramming of Strasburg geese itself
is not more disgusting than the cramming which makes
pâté de foie gras of the moral fibre of the young. When we
find even the Eton College Chronicle (1898) raising a protest
against the diet of boyish athletes, we may be sure the
evil is a crying one :-
“He [the boy in training] takes a lot of exercise, and finds he has
a good appetite. For breakfast he has a chop every morning ; we
*>
* Fads of an Old Physician, ch. xiv.
Flesh-Meat and Morals. 8I
have known some who had two. He also has heard porridge is
nourishing, and that this is why Scotchmen are so hardy and brawny.
He acts upon this information. For dinner he makes a point of having
two good helpings of meat ‘to get his weight up,' while for tea, besides
having a plate of eggs and chicken, or something of that kind, he
winds up with a large allowance of marmalade.”
Nor is it only among schoolboys that over-eating is
rampant, for the tables of the wealthy are everywhere
loaded with flesh-meat, and the example thus set is
naturally followed, first in the servants’ hall, and then, as
far as may be, in the homes of the working classes. . To
consume much flesh is regarded as the sign and symbol of
well-being—witness the popular English manner of keeping
the festival of Christmas. “We interknit ourselves with
every part of the English-speaking world,” said the journal
of the Cosme Colony, in Paraguay, describing its Christmas
celebration of 1898, “by the most sacred ceremony of over-
eating.” A nice moral bond of union, truly, between
colonies and motherland | What is likely to be the effect
On the national character of such swinish gorging 2
We come back, then, to the point that though it is not
absolutely true that “Man is what he eats,” there is, never-
theless, a large element of truth in the saying, and the
Vegetarian has just ground for suspecting that beefy meals
are not infrequently the precursors of beefy morals.
Carnalities of one kind are apt to lead to carnalities of
another, and fleshly modes of diet to fleshly modes of
thought. “Good living,” unfortunately, is a somewhat
equivocal term.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT.
{{ HE oftener we go to the vegetable world for our
food,” says Sir B. W. Richardson, “the oftener we
go to the first, and therefore the cheapest source of
supply.” The case for Vegetarianism would by no
means be complete without a statement of the economic
view, though precedence is necessarily given to the motives
of humanity and healthfulness, the higher considerations
to which the idea of economy must be subservient. If it
were proved that flesh-food is essential to the real interests
of the race, and that there is no moral objection to the use
of it, the greater outlay would be justified by the value of
the result ; but if such proof is not forthcoming (and it has
been the object of the preceding chapters to show that it
is not), it is obvious that the comparative cost of a flesh
diet and a vegetarian diet becomes a question of high
importance to mankind. What, then, are the facts 2
They are so plain as to be positively beyond dispute, and
it is a cause for marvel what Dr. J. Burney Yeo can have
meant in describing Vegetarianism as “ascheme of diet which
we believe to be utterly impracticable on an extensive scale,
and irreconcilable with the existing state of civilized man,
not so much on strictly physiological grounds as [italics
mine] on general economical considerations.” If it be in
accordance with “general economical considerations” to
pay fourpence for what can be procured for a penny, then
Only does Dr. Yeo's statement become intelligible.
For the very first fact that demands notice in this com-
parison of foods, is that not only does butchers’ meat,
pound for pound, cost about three times the price of the
cereals and pulses, but that it is under the further disad-
vantage of containing a much larger percentage of water—
* Food in Health and Disease, p. 344.
( 82 )
The Economic Argument. 83
that is to say, in purchasing flesh, you have to buy the
water, and buy it dirty, while in purchasing seeds and
grains you have not to buy the water, but add it clean.
The following passage from Sir B. W. Richardson's Foods
for Man puts the case succinctly :—
“If we make an analysis of the primest joints of animal food, legs of
mutton, sirloin of beef, rump steak, veal cutlet, pork chop, we find as
much as 70 to 75 per cent. Of water. . . . Oatmeal contains 5 or 6.
per cent. ; good wheaten flour, barley meal, beans and peas, I4 ; rice,
I5 ; and good bread, 40 to 45 of water. Taking then the value of foods
as estimated by their solid value, there are, it will be observed, a great
many kinds of vegetable foods which are incomparably superior to
animal.”
We find accordingly, when we turn from this analysis to
the actual charges at restaurants, that, whereas a good
vegetarian dinner may be got for sixpence, it is necessary
to pay four or five times that sum for an equivalent in
flesh-food. It would be waste of time to argue further
that Vegetarianism, whatever its other advantages and dis-
advantages to the individual, is much more economical than
flesh-eating.
But here we are met by the difficulty that the well-to-do,
on the one hand, are not easily influenced by the motive of
economy, while the poor, on the other hand, are (naturally)
suspicious of the gospel of “thrift,” so often preached to
them by the predatory classes who do not practise it them-
selves. The Vegetarian, however, is able to speak with
better grace.
WoRKING MAN : Vegetarianism f Ah, that's the style Cutting
down the victuals of the working man.
VEGETARIAN : On the contrary, my friend, I want to show you
how your victuals may be improved.
WORKING MAN : It's thrift you're going to preach to me, I'll bet.
Thrift on eighteen bob a week, with a wife and family.
VEGETARIAN : No, I'm not one of the philanthropists who preach
thrift and keep down wages. It's the workers' wages I want to
see increased, and the masters' victuals cut down.
WORKING MAN : Then why don't you tell them of the blessings
of Vegetarianism :
VEGETARIAN : We do ; but that's no reason why we shouldn't
tell you also. When you can get a good diet cheap, why pay dear
for a bad one f
84 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
WoRKING MAN : And where'd be the benefit if we chaps did
turn vegetarian *. The result would be our wages would fall, and
we'd be worse off than before.
VEGETARIAN : There you are quite mistaken ; for in the first
place, even if your wages fell, you'd be no worse off, but better,
since you'd at least have clean and wholesome food, instead of
cats' meat as at present ; and, Secondly, your wages would not
fall—your Unions, and the rising scale of comfort, would prevent
that. The difference would be that your home would be more
comfortable, and your reserve fund twice as strong.
WoRKING MAN : Aye, and you'll be wanting me next to give up
my glass of beer :
VEGETARIAN : You'll be wanting to do so yourself if you become
a Vegetarian. It's only those who take stimulants for food need
stimulants for drink.
WoRKING MAN : Well, well, I'll talk to the missis about it. It
sounds mighty reasonable, but we're both of us fond of a bit of
meat on Sundays. And it seems to me that if the diet's such a
pleasant one, it's odd the toffs don't practise it themselves, instead
of recommending it to the likes of us.
And here, it must be admitted the Working Man is
right; for it is perfectly useless for philanthropical persons
to preach food-thrift to the poor, unless by their own
method of living they are testifying to the truth of what
they preach.
The assertion that the cheapening of food would cause
the lowering of wages is true only as an answer to the
exaggerated claims sometimes made by Vegetarians, that
their system would of itself solve the whole problem of
employment. It would not do so; and if there were no
force but Vegetarianism in the field it is doubtful whether
the adoption of the cheaper diet would in the long run
loring any economical advantage to the workers, though it
would still benefit them morally and physically. This,
however, does not detract from the real strength of the
vegetarian argument; for with Labour now organized and
resolute, and yearly growing in power and intelligence,
there is no likelihood that the workers' thrift would
become the capitalists’ profit, on the contrary, it would
clearly add to the resources of Labour. To assert that the
working classes should maintain the cruel and wasteful
The Economic Argument. 85
practice of flesh-eating, merely to “keep up wages,” is
pure nonsense, for the same reasoning would justify the
maintenance of drink, or any other extravagant and
useless habit.
What is true for the individual and the class is true also
for the community, and unless flesh-food can be shown to
be necessary for human progress, the continuance of
pastoralism, to the detriment and neglect of agriculture,
is a criminal waste of the national resources. In this
Malthusian age of over-population scares and emigration
schemes, it is well to recollect that a remedy lies close to
hand if we would but use it. “Not only is the earth not
yet a quarter peopled,” says Mr. W. R. Greg, “but even
the inhabited portion is scarcely yet a quarter Cultivated.
In many countries the soil is barely scratched. Even in
England it is not made to yield, on an average, more than
one half its capacity.”” And in the same work he points
out that “the amount of human life sustainable on a given
area, and therefore throughout the chief portion of the
habitable globe, may be almost indefinitely increased by a
substitution pro tanto of vegetable for animal food. . . A
given acreage of wheat will feed at least ten times as many
men as the same acreage employed in growing mutton.”
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 agricul-
ture, if a healthy love of the soil, of fruit-growing, of
market-gardening, could be substituted for the insane
* Appendix to Enigmas of Life.
86 The Logic of Vegetarianism,
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 genera-
tion, even without improved land-tenure, a tide of migra-
tion 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.””
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 one thousand nine hundred and fifty 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 " (pp. 227, 23.I).
There is yet another peril that would be lessened in
proportion to the increase of Vegetarianism—the depen-
dence 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.” (Manchester Vegetarian
Lectures, “Vegetarianism and National Economy.”) f
* Essays on Diet, p. 55.
f For a clear statement of the present shocking neglect of agricul-
ture 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,
The Economic Argument. . 87
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.” 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.
* 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.
CHAPTER XVII.
D OUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES.
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, as I will show, have a convincing reply ; but
when the inquisition takes the form of asking for a present
explanation of future developments, and for a foreknow-
ledge 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
( 88 )
W" have next to deal with a special class of irregular
Doubts and Difficulties. 89
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 book-binding 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 : That would be a pity indeed . But happily
your lurid picture is based on the false assumption that Vege-
tarianism would come about by a sudden and instantaneous con-
version. That is not the way in which great changes are accom-
plished. 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 f Would not the demand, in this as in all
other usages of life, have produced the corresponding supply
G
90 The Logic of Vegetarianism
There is no need, however, to speculate as to what would happen,
because it is happening already.
ALARMIST : What is happening 2
VEGETARIAN : The articles which you named are being sup-
plied 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 vege-
tarian 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) “hide-
bound,” 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.” ”
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 P’’ &c.;
et 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 in 1897 we found the
London correspondent of a big provincial paper actually
complaining that “the crusade against meat of every kind,
* Our National Resources, I889.
Doubts and Difficulties. 9I
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 enquiry 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.” ”
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 ascer-
tain 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 2
ALARMIST : It is no joking matter. Would they not run
wild in ever-increasing numbers, and perhaps over-run the
* The Open Court, 1898.
92 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
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 2 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 (know-
ingly) 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.
T 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
ºx-------—
CTear Onº
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 dis-
ruption of existing conditions), but this does not commit
them to the absurd belief that animal life, in all its various
Poubts and Difficulties. 93
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 ? At any rate, enough has been here said on the
matter, and it is time that, in the words of the poet, we
“Pass on, like friends, to other points less easy to decide.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
BIBLE AND BEEF.
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, in his Moral and Political Philosophy, “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.”
It is a far cry from the theologian of 1784 to the Meat
Trades' journal of to-day, but from an editorial article
(November 19th, 1892) 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.”
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 régimen distasteful, we must
recognise that there is a widespread idea among religious
people that the lower animals were “sent’’ us as food, and
{{ B". and Beer’ is the title that is sometimes
( 94 )
Bible and Beef. 95
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,
as in the epigram,
Hic liber est in quo quaerit 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 :
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.
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 he
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.”
96 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
But it is now time to introduce the Textualist in person •
Textualist : Well, sir, I understand that you advocate Vege-
tarianism. What sort of a religion is that ?
VEGETARIAN : What sort 2 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 2
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 Vege-
tarians as a body have fortunately not committed them-
Selves, 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
Biffle and Beef. 97
controversy with biblical flesh-eaters, that is their own
concern ; and we may rest assured that the battle will be a
bloodless 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 happi-
ness 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 ;
98 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
that we should never be wrought up into paroxysms of
holy gratitude but for bubble-and-squeak or a good-sized
massacre l’’
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 2 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 P Why do they denounce pleasure
as effeminate indulgence, and make so much fuss about it all P 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.” (Plutarch,
On Flesh-Eating, quoted in The Ethics of Diet.)
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 forever 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 obstruct-
ing the progress of reform.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE FLESH - EATER'S KITH AND KIN.
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 un-
doubted, 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, un-
respectable 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. “Con-
siderateness 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 antiqu
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
Tº: is nothing so pleasant as the reunion of long-
humaneness. They exhibit kreophagy in its extreme logical :
form—an anachronism, no doubt, and a reductio aſ :
( 99 ) tº º
*
i
*
* <
º
*
;
IOO The Logic of Vegetarianism.
:
2.
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 civilized 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.”* A butcher he
certainly is, but an amateur butcher only, for it can hardly
be contended that the preserving of game increases the
mational 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.
Cannibalism, again, is simply flesh-eating free from those
sentimental “restrictions” that 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, as I have elsewhere
urged, 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 civilized 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
: : º Robert Buchanan. Preface to The Truth about the Game Laws.
© ºt
The Flesh-Eaſte?’s Azz/; and Āzz. IOI
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 civilized meat-diet on which our welfare is sup-
posed 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 2
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.” 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 régimen, does it not stand on record, in an old English
ballad, that Richard Coeur 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 2 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
civilized man ; but if, in these days of University Extension
* For interesting facts concerning cannibalism see Prof. W. M.
Flinders Petrie's article, Contemporary R&view, June, I897; The Fall of
the Congo Arabs, by Capt. Sidney L. Hinde, 1897; and The Land of the
Pigmies, by Capt. Guy Burrows, 1899.
*I O2 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
schemes, such a person as a Scientific Anthropophagist
should ever make his appearance, who can say that the
position might not be somewhat reversed ?
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 2 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 2
KREOPHAGIST : Where is the difference 2 Can you ask me such
a question ?
VEGETARIAN : It is uncommonly like the questions 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 2
Would they not grow to a great residuum and overrun the land 7
And the missionaries, too—are they not “Sent” us as food f And
what right have you to the name omnivorous, if you restrict your
diet in this way ? Why “omnivorous”?
KREOPHAGIST : I am prepared to answer you, Uncle, and to
give you the best of reasons why cannibalism should be
abolished. But before this gentleman—it is a little awkward,
you see I
VEGETARIAN : Ah, certainly 1 You are embarrassed by my
presence, remembering that similar talk we had. I will leave
you together, gentlemen. It is well that kinsmen should confer.
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,
The F/es/*-Eaſter's K2th and Kim. IO3
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 ideal diet, he lays him-
self 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 also
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 recog-
nised 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.”
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 recog-
nise that the lower animals also are related to us, by a close
bond of kinship 2 From our knowledge of the past we
IO4. The Logic of Vegetarianism.
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 civilized.”
CHAPTER XX.
VEGETARIANISM AS RELATED TO
OTHER REFORMS.
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 inter-locked and inter-dependent
are all these struggles towards freedom. It has been
well said by one of the contributors to The New Charter
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.”
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, in his Foods in
Health and Disease, “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
I' is sometimes held by the champions of Vegetarianism
* John C. Kenworthy, “The Humanitarian View.”
( IOS )
H
IO6 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
what they practise on others that they must expect to
encounter rational opposition.” 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 º And why have Vege-
tarians, 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 in-
fluencing public opinion ? This typical 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 |
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 enquiry,
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. Vege-
tarianism is, in truth, progressiveness in diet ; and for a Pro-
gressive to Scout such ideas as valueless and utopian is to
play the part (as far as diet is concerned) of a bigoted
reactionist. What is the meaning of this strange dis-
Vegetarianism as Related to Other Reforms. Io/
crepancy P. 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 illa lacrymae. 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 2
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 2
REFORMER : Well, there is International Peace and Arbitration.
You will admit that our first duty is to avoid unnecessary blood-
shed.
VEGETARIAN : Ah, I see And the habit of living by bloodshed
doesn’t come within your Scope I
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 2 Your reforms are excellent, I grant you;
but what of self-reform 2 Does not reform, like charity, begin at
home 2
REFORMER : Well, well; to everyone his taste—reform or self-
reform. I prefer the former ; you the latter, I suppose.
IO8 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
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 oneself. 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
academic discussion with an issue so coarsely downright :
“You are a member of an Ethical Society—do you live by
butchery P” 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 mediaeval 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, temper-
* In a late editorial review of a vegetarian pamphlet, the Inter-
national journal of Ethics (Jan., I899) actually took its stand on
the old-word dogma that there is a deep division between men and
“ mere animals,” and that animals are not “persons ° or “ends,” but
** mere means.”
Wegetarianism as Related to Other Reforms. Io9
ance, and plain living, to ignore Vegetarianism is to ignore
one of the most potent influences for self-restraint. I am
almost afraid to quote Sir Henry Thompson in any matter
that tends to the praise of Vegetarianism, in view of
the extreme irritability which that distinguished scientist
exhibits as regards his sacred text, with which you must
never take the liberty of assuming that, when it distinctly
says one thing, it does 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.”” 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 forever preaching about the avoidance
of luxuries and stimulants, if you rule out of your system
the one dietary which makes stimulants and luxuries
impossible f The relation of Vegetarianism to Temper-
ance, of the food question to the drink question, is that of
the greater which includes the less.
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, civilized
* Ninetecnth Century, May, 1885.
I IO The Logic of Vegetarianism.
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 Inquisi-
tion, 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
and decay. 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 everyday habits of the average man. Few of us, com-
paratively, 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.
Vegetarianism as Related to Other Reforms. I I I
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 those 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 zoophi-
list 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 organization, and that it is idle to talk of recog-
nising “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.
CHAPTER XXI.
C O N C L U S I O N .
has been to prove the logical soundness of vegetarian
principles, and the hollowness of the hackneyed
taunt, so often a makeshift for reasoning, that Vege-
tarians are a crew of mild brainless enthusiasts whose
“hearts are better than their heads.” How far I have
been successful in this purpose it is for the reader to judge ;
I trust it has at least been made plain that, if it is logic that
our friends are in need of, we are quite ready to accommo-
date them, and that nothing will please us better than a
thorough intellectual sifting of the whole problem of diet.
Only it must be a thorough sifting. The great foe of
Vegetarianism, as of every other reform, is Habit—that
inert, blind, dogged force which time called into being,
and time only can outwear—and it is this which lurks
behind the flimsy sophisms and excuses that the flesh-eater
loves to set up, in which, as a rule, though there is much
show of controversy, there is little real discussion. To
those of our opponents who honestly wish to grapple with
the question of diet, and to understand what Vegetarianism
means (whether they agree with it or not), I submit that
the following points have at any rate been clearly set before
them :—
(1) That the objections raised to the name “vegetarian’”
are founded on sheer ignorance of the word's origin, and
calculated, if not designed, to distract attention from the
substance by fixing it on the shadow. It is not, nowadays,
seriously denied, by any responsible authority, that a
vegetable diet, with the addition of eggs and nilk, is quite
adequate for nutriment; but the method is this—to allow
what is said (rightly or wrongly) of the insufficiency of a
strictly vegetable diet to be misunderstood by the public as
referring to “Vegetarianism.” Thus Dr. J. Burney Yeo,
( 1 12 )
Tº: chief object of this work, as stated at the outset,
Conclusion. II.3
1n his Food in Health and Disease, first argues that “Vege-
tarians” have no right to their title, because they consume
animal products, and then proceeds to allege various
reasons against “a purely vegetable diet,” which by his
own showing is not what Vegetarianism represents. This
is a fair sample of flesh-eaters' logic.
(2) That the immediate aim of Vegetarians is not that
which, under various forms, is so industriously foisted
on them, viz.: a desire to attain at one step to the
millennium, by altogether ceasing to take the life of
animals, or by entire abstinence from animal products;
but rather it is a practical, intelligible, though necessarily
imperfect attempt to humanise, as far as may be, the
present sanguinary diet system, by the omission at least of
its more loathsome and barbarous features.
(3) That Vegetarianism, if once admitted to be practic-
able, offers certain positive benefits of the utmost value,
humane, aesthetic, hygienic, social, economic; while, on
the other hand, the denials that have hitherto been made
of its practicability, on the plea of structure, digestion,
climate, laws of nature, and so forth, are far too weak and
illogical to bear the test of criticism. There may, of
Course, be some conclusive reason against Vegetarianism,
but if so, why is its production delayed 2
(4) That in the greater number of the arguments
brought against Vegetarianism, the importance of the
moral aspect of the question is studiously kept out of
sight. Thus Sir Henry Thompson, in his Nineteenth
Century article of 1885, while admitting the possibility
of abstaining from flesh-foods, gave judgment on the whole
in favour of a moderate use of them—but without allowing
the smallest weight to humane or moral considerations !
Writing on the same subject in 1898, he so far repaired
this oversight as to argue that it is really kinder to eat
animals than not to do so, because otherwise they would
not be bred at all ! That is the amount of attention the
moral side of Vegetarianism receives from its opponents, a
great humane issue being set aside by a sophism more
suited for a Savoy comedy than for serious dis-
CUISS1C11.
But there is the further question—and as far as these
II4 The Logic of Vegetarianism.
chapters are concerned, the final question—why, if Vege-
tarianism is part and parcel of a genuine “progressive ’’
movement, does it not more rapidly progress P “Why so
little result from your propaganda P” is the frequent sneer
of the flesh-eater ; and the Vegetarian himself is some-
times fain to be down-hearted at the seeming slowness of
his advance. Does Vegetarianism progress P Yes and no,
according to the expectations, reasonable and unreason-
able, that its supporters have been cherishing. If we
have fondly hoped to witness, in the near future, the
triumph of the humaner living, it must be allowed that the
actual rate of progress is extremely disheartening; but if,
On the contrary, we work under a rational understanding
that a widespread change of diet, like any other radical
change, is a matter not of years but of centuries, then we
shall not find in the slow growth of our movement any
reason for dissatisfaction. Revolution in personal habits,
be it remembered, is even more difficult than revolution in
political forms, and needs a greater time for its fulfilment;
and looked at in this light, Vegetarianism has made as
much progress, during the past half-century, as any other
Cause which aims at So far-reaching a change.
But what of the many individual failures, it is asked,
among those who make trial of Vegetarianism f Taking
the circumstances into account, the failures cannot be
regarded as numerous; for in every such movement there
are half-hearted people who are impelled by motives of
restlessness and curiosity, rather than of real conviction,
and in view of the personal obstacles that beset the path of
the Vegetarian, it is not surprising that in food-reform, as
in drink-reform, there are a certain number of backsliders.
In an ordinary household every possible influence, social
and domestic, is brought to bear on the heretic who
abstains from flesh foods. Anxious relatives and indignant
friends adjure him to remember the duty he owes to him-
self and to his family, and urge him for the sake of those
dear to him, if not for his own, to return to that great
sacramental bond of union between man and man—the
eating of our non-human fellow-beings. Is he smitten by
one of the numberless ailments that are the stock-in-trade
of the physician, and of which flesh-eaters are daily the
Conclusion. II.5.
victims in every part of the world? The doctor looks wise,
shakes his head, and informs a sorrowing circle that it is
the direct result of “his vegetarianism.” Above all, the fear
of ridicule, acting on the natural unwillingness of mankind
to venture along unknown paths, is a strong deterrent; for
there are still many persons to whom the idea of abstinence
from butchers' meat is positively a matter for merriment,
and it seems fated that Vegetarianism, like every new
principle, must be a target for such shafts. Well, so be it !
We know that the struggle will be a long one ; and if
Vegetarianism has got to run the blockade of Noodledom,
and a huge amount of foolish talk must perforce be fired
off, the sooner the battle commences, and the sooner it is
concluded, the better for all concerned. And ridicule, as
the flesh-eater will learn, is a weapon which can be wielded
by more parties than one.
For, to be frank, the dietists of the old-fashioned
kreophagist school have talked, and are talking, a great
deal of downright nonsense in their tirades against Vege-
tarianism, and the only reason why they have not been
more widely brought to book is that they speak in Orthodox
quarters where no reply is permitted. The Oracle, of
course, must not be answered or criticised. So far as they
have condescended to state a case against food-reform, it is
a case which would be laughed out of court, as a string of
quibbles and absurdities, in any open discussion; for the
specialist, that most humourless of persons, is apt to forget
that the moment he quits the ground on which he has
made himself a master (and all such ground has very
narrow limitations) he is no longer infallible, and that if he
thinks to exorcise modern feeling by the repetition of
ancient formulas he will only make himself ridiculous.
And as a matter of pure humour, apart from humanity,
which is the more comical—the man who can live in
simple affluence on a supply of food which is as little
costly to himself as it is burdensome to others, or he
who cannot be content unless he gluts an Ogreish
appetite on animals slaughtered for his larder, and then
pharisaically pretends that he has done them a kindness by
eating them P It is custom, and custom alone, that pre-
vents civilized men from seeing the essential silliness of
maintaining the diet of Savages.
II6 The Logic of Vegetarianism,
That a percentage of those who make trial of Vege-
tarianism should return to their former habit is in
accordance with what always happens in the fight
between the new and the old, and at the utmost—that is,
in the rare cases where such trial has been a genuine one
—proves only that a change of diet is much more difficult
for some persons than it is for others, a fact which all
rational food-reformers have recognised. But from the
force of affirmative testimony there is no escape, when, as
in the case of Vegetarianism successfully practised, and
yielding the best results, the instances are drawn from
every rank and temperament, and are amply sufficient in
number to prove the experience trustworthy. It is idle to
go on asserting that a thing Cannot be done, when you are
face to face with some thousands of people who not only
have done it, but are happier and healthier in consequence.
With the question of the right choice of food, and how
to adopt Vegetarianism, I am not here concerned ; such
information is readily accessible in current vegetarian
literature. But it must be said in conclusion—and this is
the thought which, above all others, I would leave in the
mind of the reader—that the surest warrant of success in
the reform of diet is a sincere belief in the moral rightness
of the cause. The spirit in which one takes up Vege-
tarianism is the main factor in the result. It is useless to
look for any absolute proof in such matters—the proof is
in one's self; for those, at least, who have heart to feel,
and brain to ponder, the cruelty and folly of flesh-eating.
It is an issue where Logic is as wholly on the one side as
Habit is wholly on the other, and where Habit is as
Certainly the shield of barbarism as Logic is the sword of
humaneness.
A PPE N ID IX.
FOR a fuller statement of some of the points touched on in
the preceding chapters, the reader is referred to the following
works:—
Ethical and Humanitarian.
“The Ethics of Diet,” a Biographical History of the Litera-
ture of Humane Dietetics, by Howard Williams, M.A.
Revised Edition, 1896, 5s. (Ideal Publishing Union, 33,
Paternoster Row, E.C.)
“The Gospel of Humaneness,” by Count Leo Tolstoy.
Vegetarian Library Series, Is. (Ideal Publishing Union,
33, Paternoster Row, E.C.)
“Cattle-Ships and Our Meat Supply,” “Behind the Scenes
in Slaughter-Houses,” “The Evils of Butchery,” “The
Humanities of Diet,” 2d. each. (Humanitarian League, 53,
Chancery Lane, W.C.)
“Animals' Rights,” by Henry S. Salt, 1892, Is. (George
Bell and Sons.)
Scientific, Hygienic, Economic.
“The Perfect Way in Diet,” by Anna Kingsford, M.D.,
1881, Is. (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.)
“Essays on Diet,” by Francis William Newman, 1883, 2s.
(Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.)
“Foods for Man,” by Sir B. W. Richardson. Longman's
Magazine, May, 1888.
“Manchester Vegetarian Lectures,” 2 vols., 1888, 1889,
6d. each. (Vegetarian Society, Manchester.)
For practical directions, cookery books, &c., apply to the
London Vegetarian Association, Memorial Hall, E.C., or the
Vegetarian Society, 19, Oxford Street, Manchester.
( 1 17 )
I N D E X.
Adams, B. K., quoted, 33
AEsthete, the, 64-67
Alarmist, the, 89-92
“All or Nothing ” argument, Io-I2
(see “Consistency”)
Animals, what would become of
them 2 91, 92
Animal products, use of, 5-7, 9, 54,
55, II2
Anthropoid apes, 2I-23
Anthropologist, the, 37-40 *
Anthropophogist, the, Io2
Asceticism, 12, 77
Axon, W. E. A., quoted, 86
Bible and Beef, 94
#3on Vivant, the, 42-44
Brahminism, not Vegetarianism,
56, 92
British Islander, the, 31-33
British Medical 3 ournal, quoted,
25, 41, 46
Buchanan, Robert, quoted, Ioo
Butchery, effect on character, 59-63
Canine teeth, argument from, 20
Cannibalism, Io, 27, 28, 79 (note),
IoI (note); its relation to flesh-
eating, 99-IOI
Carnalist, the, 78, 81
Carpenter, Edward, quoted, 29
(note), 76, Iro
Cartesian theory, 38
Carus, Dr. Paul, quoted, 91
Cattle transit, 43
Chemical argument, 9, Io
Chemist, the, 26-30
Cheyne, Dr., quoted, 74
Chicago shambles, 47, 48, 61, 68
Climate, argument from, 31-35
“Cock and Bull” argument, 54, 55
Coit, Dr. Stanton, quoted, 50, 51
Consistency man, the, 53-56
Consistency, true and false (see “All
or Nothing ”), 53, 54, 57
Cramming system, 80, 81
Cycling club, wegetarian, 72, 74
Darwinian theory, 37
Dembo, Dr., quoted, 44
De Quincey, quoted, 68
Digestibility of foods, 25-28
Diseased flesh, 72,73
Drover, the, 43
Dukhobortsi, the, 17, 18
Economy of vegetarian diet, 82, 83
Esquimaux, what would become of
them 232, 33
“Ethics of Diet,” the, 15
Ethical Societies, attitude towards
Vegetarianism, 51, IoS
Fish-eating, 57, 58, 87 (note)
Flinders Petrie, Professor, quoted, Ior
Franklin, Benjamin, 36, 40
Frugivorous nature of Man,
I9, 20, 25
Gordon-Cumming, C. F., quoted,
27, 28
Grace before meat, 97
Greg, W. R., quoted, 85
Habit, influence of, II2, I 16
Haig, Dr. A., 29, 74, 75
Herbivora, the, 20, 25
Hofmann's Experiments, 26-28
Hudson, W. H., quoted, 48
Humanity, synonymous with cul-
ture, 64, 67, 68
Hunt, Leigh, quoted, 67, 97
Hygienic Aspect of Vegetarianism,
7o
International 3 ournal of Ethics, Io&
(note)
Keith, Dr. G., quoted, 8o
Kenworthy, J. C., quoted, IoS
Kingsford, Dr. Anna, 13 (note),
quoted, 79
Kropotkin, Peter, quoted, 37, 38,
86 (note)
Land question, the, 85
( 1 18 )
I?zaſeº,
II9
Lawrence, Sir William, quoted, 32
Leather, what should we do with-
out 2 89-92
Lester, H. F., quoted, 60, 63
Life, relative value of, Io, 40, 55-57
Logic, uses of, I, II2
“Man is what he eats,” 76
Manure question, 90
Maxwell, Sir H., 51
Mayor, Rev Professor J. E. B., 5, 22
Meat Trades 3 ournal, quoted, 44, 94
Metaphysic of the larder, 48-50
Michelet, Jules, quoted, 45
Monastic orders, vegetarian diet of,
I4, 79
Moral aspect of diet question, Io, 46,
77-80, II3
Nature, argument from, 36-40
Newman, Professor F. W., quoted,
72, 86
Nordau, Max, quoted, 86
Oldfield, Dr. J., quoted, 22 (note), 28,
tº ºt 29, 34
Omnivorism, 21, 22, IOS
Owen, Sir Richard, quoted, 19
Paley, Dr. William, quoted, 94
Patriot, the, 15, 16
Philanthropist, the, 61, 63
Plutarch, quoted, I4, 98
Progressive movement, relation of
Vegetarianism towards, Ioff
Psychic philosopher, the, 78, 79
Psychical flesh-eaters, 77
“Pythagorean diet,” the same as
Vegetarianism, 4, 6
Reform and self-reform, Io&
Reformer, the, Io'7, Io&
Richardson, Sir B. W., quoted, 19,
28–30, 59, 74, 80, 82, 83
Rights of animals, I IO
Ritchie, Professor D. G., 51
Roman soldiery, diet of, 15
Scientist, the, 20-23
Schreiner, Olive, quoted, Io9
Shaw, G. Bernard, quoted, 67
Shelley, 17
Slaughter-house, the, 44; Reform of
5I, 52
Slaughterman's work, effect on
character, 59-63
Slavery, justified by bible texts, 95
Smith, Dr. T. P., quoted, 44, 45, 55
Sophist, the, 49, 5o
Sport, in relation to flesh-eating,
99, IOO
Stead, W. T., 47, 48, 56
Stephen, Leslie, 51
Stoicism, 98
Superior Person, the, 9–12
Temperance Movement, 33
Tertullian, Contra Psychicos,78 (note)
Textualist, the, 96
Thompson, Sir Henry, 6, 7, 23, 29,
50, 57, IOO, IO3, IO9, II3
Thomson, J. Arthur, quoted, 38
Thoreau, quoted, 76, 77, Ioa.
Tuberculosis, danger of, 72, 73
Turkish soldiery, diet of, 16, 17
Valetudinarian, the, 71, 72
“Vegetarian,” the name, origin, 4;
objections urged against it, 4-8,
II2; defined, 5, 6; why retained,
7, 8
Vegetarianism, misunderstandings
of, I, 2 ; grades of, 6, II ; its real
purpose, 9. I2, II3, ; a moral
principle, 9, Io, 41, 59, 78, 79,
II 3 ; relation to other reforms,
IO5-III ; progress, II4; indivi-
dual failures and successes, II.4,
II6
Vegetarian Society, its founding and
principles, 4, 5
Verbalist, the, 4-8
Wages question, in relation to Vege-
tarianism, 84, 85
Wallace, Dr. AHſred R., quoted, 48
Wilson, Dr. Andrew, 27, 28, 39, 56,
- 57, IO3
Wollaston’s “Religion of Nature,”
4I, 42.
Women's work at Deptford, 60
Woolman, John, quoted, 95
Working man, the, 83, 84
Yeo, Dr. J. Burney, II2, I 13, quoted,
82, IoS
Zoophily, as related to Vegetarian-
ism, Io9-III
SEP 2 7 1916
WORKS BY SAME AUTHOR.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poet and Pioneer, Revised
Edition, 1896, 3/6. (Wm. Reeves, London ;
Charles Scribner, New York.)
Life of Henry David Thoreau, Revised Edition, 1896,
1/6. (Great Writers Series, Walter Scott, London ;
A. Lovell, New York.) - ... Nº-,
** *
Richard Jefferies. A study, 1894, 26. (Swan Sonnen-
schein, London ; Macmillan, New York.)
The Life of James Thomson, B.V., Revised Edition,
1898, 36. (A. & H. B. Bonner, London.)
Animals' Rights, Considered in Relation to Social Progress,
1892, 1/-. (George Bell & Sons, London ;
Macmillan, New York.) J a
Songs of Freedom, Selected and Edited by H. S. SALT.
1/-. (Canterbury Poets, Walter Scott, London.)
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