for their silliness is far in excess of their honesty. For years
the opponents of vegetarianism in the press had been asking,
"What should we do without leather?" etc.; yet as soon as the
substitutes for these articles began to be exhibited at the
annual Vegetarian Congress, the note was changed, and the
reporters remarked that the exhibition was "not of much
interest," until we found the London correspondent of a big
provincial paper actually complaining that "the crusade against
meat of every kind, _and even against leather_ (at this
exhibition they have boots and shoes made of imitation leather),
is carrying the reform a little too far." Our critics are hard
to satisfy. We are going "a little too far" if we produce a
substitute for leather; if we do not produce one, we are not
going far enough.
And now, with all becoming gravity, we turn to the second branch
of our subject—the disinterested inquiry as to "what would
become of the animals" if we ceased to kill them for food. "If
the life of animals," says Dr. Paul Carus, "had to be regarded
as sacred as human life, there can be no doubt about it that
whole industries would be destroyed, and human civilisation
would at once drop down to a very primitive condition. Many
millions would starve, and large cities would disappear from the
face of the earth. But the brute creation would suffer too.
There might be a temporary increase of brute life, but certainly
not of happiness. Cattle would only be raised for draught-oxen
and milk-kine, and they would not die the sudden death at the
hands of the butcher, but slowly of old age or by disease."[46]
Footnote 46:
"The Open Court," 1898.
A pathetic picture, indeed! It does not for a moment occur
to this sapient prophet of disaster that the adoption of
vegetarianism will necessarily be gradual, and further that
vegetarians do _not_ hold the life of animals to be "as sacred
as human life." To critics who do not even ascertain what
the system means before they reject it, and who ignore all
consideration of the degrees and relative sacredness of the
various forms of life, vegetarianism must naturally seem to be a
confused jumble of thought—the confusion, in reality, being
altogether on their own side.
ALARMIST: There is another aspect of this question, and
a very grave one. If flesh-eating were abolished, what
would become of the animals?
VEGETARIAN: Yes, let us talk about that fearful
contingency. You think they would be thrown out of
employment, so to speak—would find their careers cut
short, or rather left long?
ALARMIST: It is no joking matter. Would they not run
wild in ever-increasing numbers, and perhaps overrun the
land, or, if food failed them, lie dead and dying about
our roadways and suburbs?
VEGETARIAN: Before I relieve your anxiety on this point,
may I just remark that this second difficulty seems
to counterbalance the former one? If every suburban
householder is likely to have a dead ox against his
garden-gate, we evidently need not fear the failure
of the leather and tallow trade. But once again you
are mistaken. You have overlooked the fact that the
breeding of animals is not free and unrestricted, but
is kept within certain limits, and carefully regulated
by man; so that if the demand for butchers' meat should
gradually decline, there would be no more alarming
result than a corresponding gradual decline in the
supply from the breeder.
ALARMIST: Well, I don't know. I sadly doubt whether
things would balance themselves so comfortably.
VEGETARIAN: Ah, you think that some neglected old
porker, like Scott's "Last Minstrel," would be left out
in the cold.
"For, well-a-day! their date was fled,
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and oppressed,
Longed to be with them and at rest."
But no; for look at the case of the donkey. We do
not (knowingly) eat donkeys, yet a dead donkey is
proverbially a rare sight. Nor are we overrun with
donkeys—at least, not in the sense referred to.
ALARMIST: Yet I understand that in India, where there is
a reluctance to kill animals, they are often in wretched
plight.
_Vegetarian_: True; but we were talking not of _killing_
animals but of _eating_ them. Vegetarianism is not
Brahminism; we would kill when necessary, whether for
our own sake or the animals', but we would not breed
them in vast numbers in order to kill, nor kill them in
order to eat. Surely the distinction is a clear one?
The attitude of vegetarians towards this subject is indeed plain
enough for those who wish to understand it. Regarding the
slaughter of animals for food as cruel and unnecessary, they
advocate its discontinuance (a process which, if it comes about
at all, will, as I have shown, be a gradual one, and will at no
point cause any sudden disruption of existing conditions), but
this does not commit them to the absurd belief that animal life,
in all its various grades, is absolutely sacred and inviolable.
Must we not suspect that the apologists of flesh-eating who make
these childish alarums and excursions are fain to do so from
some inner conviction of the weakness of their own case?
BIBLE AND BEEF
"Bible and Beer" is the title that is sometimes sarcastically
applied to the political alliance between churchmen and
publicans; and in like manner the dietetic alliance between the
"unco' guid" and the butchers may be not inaptly designated as
Bible and Beef. When all else fails, the authority of Holy Writ
is triumphantly cited by the bibliolatrous flesh-eater as the
great court of appeal to which the food question must be
carried; and here at least, it is pleaded, there can be no doubt
as to the verdict. "It seems to me," wrote Dr. William Paley,
more than a hundred years ago, "that it would be difficult to
defend this right [to the flesh of animals] by any arguments
which the light and order of Nature afford, and that we are
beholden for it to the permission recorded in Scripture."[47]
Footnote 47:
"Moral and Political Philosophy."
It is a far cry from the theologian of 1784 to the _Meat Trades'
Journal_ of to-day, but from an editorial article we learn that
the organ of the butchering trade is animated by the same
profound sense of piety. "The great Creator of all flesh," it
says, "gave us the beasts of the field, not only for our food,
but for other purposes equally as essential to us. The grass
must be eaten by our flocks and herds, otherwise the fertility
of the soil would vanish. It was a frightful punishment on the
Egyptian [_sic_] King that he should be reduced to the level of
the beasts of the field and eat grass."[48]
Footnote 48:
November 19, 1892.
Now, waiving the fact that grass is not precisely the diet that
vegetarians adopt, and that it is, therefore, no reproach to
vegetarianism if Nebuchadnezzar, not being a ruminant, found
such a regimen distasteful, we must recognise that there is a
widespread idea among religious people that the lower animals
were "sent" us as food, and that the practice of flesh-eating
has the seal of biblical sanction. In meeting this prejudice,
there is a right line and a wrong line of reasoning, both of
which have at different times been followed by vegetarian
speakers.
The wrong line is to attempt to answer the texts quoted as
favourable to flesh-eating by pitting against them other texts
as favourable to vegetarianism—a course which not only degrades
the Bible into a text-book for disputants,[49] but also
surrenders the most sacred claim of the reformed diet—viz., its
appeal not to this or to that textual authority, which some
thinkers accept and others deny, but to the universal principle
of humanity and justice.
Footnote 49:
As in the epigram,
_Hic liber est in quo quærit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua_:
which may be freely rendered,
This is the Book, to dogmatists well-known,
Where each man dogma seeks, and finds—his own.
The right line is to show, first, that it is wholly impossible,
in the face of modern knowledge and evolutional science, to
maintain the old "anthropocentric" idea which regarded man as
the sum and centre of the universe, a monarch for whose special
benefit all else was created; and, secondly, that the ancient
Hebrew scriptures, whatever be their exact significance
for Christian readers (a matter with which we are not here
concerned), cannot be regarded as affording any clue to the
solution of modern problems which have arisen centuries later.
It would be no whit more absurd to argue that negro-slavery is
justifiable because it was not condemned in the Bible than to
claim scriptural sanction for the cruelties of butchery because
the Jews were flesh-eaters. And, indeed, such arguments _have_
been advanced by religious people in support of slavery; we
read, for example, the following in John Woolman's journal: "A
friend in company began to talk in support of the slave-trade,
and said the negroes were understood to be the offspring of
Cain, their blackness being the mark which God set upon him
after he murdered Abel; that it was the design of Providence
they should be slaves, as a condition proper to the race of so
wicked a man as Cain was."
But it is now time to introduce the textualist in person.
TEXTUALIST: Well, sir, I understand that you advocate
vegetarianism. What sort of a religion is that?
VEGETARIAN: The real sort—the sort that has to be
_practised_ as well as preached.
TEXTUALIST: If it is the real sort, the proof is easy.
Show me the passages in the Book.
VEGETARIAN: I beg to be excused. I do not bandy texts.
TEXTUALIST: What? You can produce no verses in support
of your religion? I thought vegetarians relied on what
they call the "Ten Best Texts," and here I stand ready
to meet them with five-and-twenty better ones.
VEGETARIAN: I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am not
one of the text-quoting vegetarians. I regard all such
methods of reasoning as wholly irrelevant. There is
not the least doubt that the Jews were a flesh-eating
people; indeed, the very idea of vegetarianism (that is,
a deliberate and permanent disuse of flesh-food for
moral and hygienic reasons) was wholly unknown to them.
What, then, can be the use of hunting up Bible-texts
which do not refer, one way or the other, to the point
at issue?
TEXTUALIST: But if it was unknown and unmentioned in the
Bible, what hope for vegetarianism? It perishes like all
else that is unscriptural.
VEGETARIAN: The same hope as for the abolition of
slavery, or any other humane cause that has had birth in
our modern era. We live and learn.
TEXTUALIST: But it is written, "Rise, Peter, kill and
eat." What is your answer to that?
VEGETARIAN: It needs no answer, as you will see if you
study the context.
TEXTUALIST: Then you have not a single text to set
against the injunction with which I confront you?
VEGETARIAN: Not one—unless it be, "Answer not a fool
according to his folly."
To repel texts with texts is a futility to which vegetarians as a
body have fortunately not committed themselves, because vegetarianism
appeals, without reference to religion, to the common sentiment of
humaneness, and numbers amongst its adherents men of every nationality
and creed. If biblical vegetarians have engaged in controversy with
biblical flesh-eaters, that is their own concern; and we may rest
assured that the battle will be a sham one, as the firing is with blank
cartridge on both sides.
Apart, however, from such irrational argument, there is a sense
in which an appeal may be fairly made to the Bible, as to any
other great ethnical scripture or world-literature—that is, to
the spirit, as distinguished from the letter, the context as
distinguished from the text. That vegetarians, preaching and
practising a doctrine of love and humaneness, should quote,
"Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed ... to you it
shall be for meat," as indicating the ideal primitive diet, and
"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain," as
prophetic of the ideal future, is just and appropriate, for such
passages, though dealing with poetry rather than fact, are far
more suggestive than any textual evidence; and when we come to
ask what is the spirit of the New Testament towards such
instincts as that from which vegetarianism springs—the desire to
increase the happiness and lessen the suffering of all sentient
life—it is plain that here, at least, the vegetarian is on
unassailable ground.
But the answer to the biblical flesh-eater lies still nearer at hand.
For the moment any attempt is made by him to ally the modern religious
spirit with the maintenance of the slaughter-house, the incongruity
of his position is revealed. Take "grace before meat," for instance,
and note the flat impiety of offering thanks to God over the body of
a fellow-being that has been cruelly slaughtered for the sake of our
"pleasures of the table." As Leigh Hunt has remarked: "It is not
creditable to a thinking people that the two things they most thank
God for should be eating and fighting. We say grace when we are going
to cut up lamb and chicken, and when we have stuffed ourselves with
both to an extent that an orang-outang would be ashamed of; and we
offer up our best praises to the Creator for having blown and sabred
his 'images,' our fellow-creatures, to atoms, and drenched them in
blood and dirt. This is odd. Strange that we should keep our most pious
transports for the lowest of our appetites and the most melancholy of
our necessities; that we should never be wrought up into paroxysms of
holy gratitude, but for bubble-and-squeak or a good-sized massacre!"
But why, it may be asked, if the practice of flesh-eating is
such as it is here described, do "religious" people acquiesce
in it? Why indeed! except that, in these personal matters of
every-day life, the religionism of to-day, like the stoicism
of old, has a tendency to respect the letter, but disregard
the spirit of its principles. The complaint which modern
vegetarianism brings against the religious flesh-eaters is
that which the humaner philosophy made, centuries ago, against
the carnivorous stoics:
"Who is this censor who is so loud against the
indulgence of the body and the luxuries of the kitchen?
Why do they denounce pleasure as effeminate indulgence,
and make so much fuss about it all? Surely it had been
more logical if, while banishing from the table
sweet-meats and perfumes, they had exhibited yet more
indignation against the diet of blood! For as though all
their philosophy merely regarded household accounts,
they are simply interested in cutting down dinner
expenses, so far as concerns the superfluous dainties of
the table. They have no idea of deprecating what is
murderous and cruel."[50]
Footnote 50:
Plutarch, "On Flesh-Eating," quoted in "The Ethics of Diet,"
by Howard Williams.
And so is it nowadays with the champions of Bible and Beef, for,
like all formalists, they sacrifice the substance of religion to
the shadow, and while for ever quoting the sacred names of
justice and loving-kindness, not only oppose those principles
when in conflict with their own appetites, but actually base
their opposition on the authority of their "scripture." It would
be impossible to do the Bible a deadlier wrong than this; for
whether it be "inspired" or not, it is by universal consent a
great literary monument, and those who profess to reverence it
most should be the last to wish to utilise it as a handbook for
reactionists—a store from which to draw irrelevant quotations
for obstructing the progress of reform.
THE FLESH-EATER'S KITH AND KIN
There is nothing so pleasant as the reunion of long-separated
kinsfolk, and it is the cheerful duty of this chapter to exhibit
the flesh-eater in what may be called his domestic relationship,
to wit, his undoubted, but somewhat forgotten, connection with
the cannibal and the blood-sportsman. For, disguise it as he
may, he cannot altogether escape the fact that this kinship is a
real one. Kreophagist and anthropophagist, butcher and amateur
butcher, are but different branches of one and the same great
predatory stock. The cannibal and the sportsman are the wicked
uncles of the pious flesh-eater, unrespectable descendants from
a common ancestry, who have failed to adapt themselves to modern
requirements, and, like belated Royalists in a Commonweal, have
continued to play the old privileged game when its date is
over-past, an indiscretion which has caused them—the cannibal
especially—to be ignored as much as possible by their more
cautious relatives. We are all familiar with that chapter of
"The Egoist" (the "Minor Incident showing an Hereditary
Aptitude in the Use of the Knife"), in which the youthful Sir
Willoughby Patterne, already an adept at "cutting," is "not at
home" to his poor relation, the middle-aged unpresentable
lieutenant of marines. "Considerateness dismisses him on
the spot without parley." Even such is the attitude of the
respectable flesh-eater towards the bloodthirsty cannibal, and
in a less extent also towards the devotee of murderous "sport."
But to the student of the food question these antique types have
no little interest, as a survival from an earlier and more
innocent phase of flesh-eating when the old brutality was as yet
untempered by the new spirit of humaneness. They exhibit
kreophagy in its extreme logical form—an anachronism, no doubt,
and a _reductio ad absurdum_ in the present age—but at least
logical, and, therefore, not to be overlooked by those who, in
their hostility to food reform, are so fond of appealing to
logic.
The sportsman, for instance, is an old-world barbarian born into
a civilised era, a representative of the age when flesh-food
could only be obtained by the chase, and he is candid enough to
avow that he does his killing, not like the butcher, in order to
earn a livelihood, but for the brutal reason that he _enjoys_
it. "The instincts of the primeval man," it has been well said,
"food-hunting, predatory, self-preserving, re-emerge in the
modern: moral sanctions are disregarded, the rights of inferior
races are forgotten, and the hunter feels himself, figuratively
speaking, naked, savage, bloodthirsty, and unashamed."[51] A
butcher he certainly is, but an amateur butcher only, for it can
hardly be contended that the preserving of game increases the
national food-supply, in view of the fact that pheasants, hares,
and even rabbits, are sold at a price far below their actual
cost of production, and are thus a direct tax on the public
resources. The blood-sportsman, then, is a member of the
carnivorous family by another line of descent, which has kept a
touch of the rank primitive wildness even to the present day;
and this one thing alone can be said in his favour, that when he
butchers in sport, he at least does the butchery himself, and
does not delegate the filthy task to others. He is his own
slaughterman—a mere and simple savage.
Footnote 51:
Robert Buchanan. Preface to J. Connell's "The Truth about the
Game Laws."
Cannibalism, again, is simply flesh-eating, free from those
sentimental "restrictions" which Sir Henry Thompson and his
fellow scientists deplore, and the cannibal's only fault, judged
from the scientist's standpoint, is that he carries out the
scientific doctrine not wisely but too well. For this reason
every lecture on vegetarianism ought to touch on cannibalism as
illustrating a past chapter in the great history of diet—a past
chapter as regards the leading and so-called civilised nations,
but to this day a present and very instructive chapter in the
world's remoter regions, from which we may learn certain lessons
as to the feelings, arguments, and fallacies that attend
the gradual process of transition from one dietetic habit
to another. The flesh-eater generally affects to look on
cannibalism as something monstrous and abnormal, a dreadful
perversion of taste which has no connection with the civilised
meat-diet on which our welfare is supposed to depend; but the
real facts show that the truth is quite otherwise, and that the
position of the cannibal who is being proselytised to give up
his man-eating is in many ways analogous to that of the
flesh-eater who is worried by the vegetarian propagandists. The
glories of the old English roast beef may be instructively
compared with the glories of the old African roast man.
It is amusing to observe that the kreophagist who, on the one
side, regards abstinence from flesh food as an absurd delusion
is equally confident that cannibalism, on the other side, is an
unpardonable infamy, forgetting that many of the excuses that
are made for flesh-eating might be made with as much justice for
cannibalism also. "Prejudice is strange," says Professor
Flinders Petrie. "A large part of mankind are cannibals, and
still more, perhaps all, have been so, including our own
forefathers, for Jerome describes the Atticotti, a British
tribe, as preferring human flesh to that of cattle.... Does the
utilitarian object? Yet one main purpose of the custom is
utility; in its best and innocent forms it certainly gives the
greatest happiness to the greatest number."[52] Nor can it be
held that all cannibals are a specially degraded race, for
Livingstone and later travellers quote well-authenticated
instances to show that tribes addicted to man-eating are
sometimes more advanced, mentally and physically, than those
which abstain from such diet; and as to the hygienic merits of
the regimen, does it not stand on record, in an old English
ballad, that Richard Cœur de Lion was cured of a dangerous
malady by eating a Turk's head, which was served up to him as
the best substitute for pork? The kreophagist at present is able
to pass unlimited censure on the cannibal, because the poor
savage has not the wit to argue with the civilised man; but if,
in these days of University Extension schemes, such a person as
a scientific anthropophagist should ever make his appearance,
who can say that the position might not be somewhat reversed?
Footnote 52:
For interesting facts concerning cannibalism, see Professor W.
M. Flinders Petrie's article, _Contemporary Review_, June
1897; "The Fall of the Congo Arabs," by Captain Sidney L.
Hinde, 1897; and "The Land of the Pigmies," by Captain Guy
Burrows, 1899.
VEGETARIAN: Let me introduce you, gentlemen. You are
blood-relations, I think, and should have much to say to
each other. The Kreophagist—the Anthropophagist.
KREOPHAGIST: Good morning, uncle. But I cannot admit the
relationship if it is true that you are addicted to the
atrocious habit of cannibalism.
ANTHROPOPHAGIST: How atrocious, nephew? If you eat one
kind of flesh, why should you abstain from another? Are
you aware that they are chemically identical? Pig or
"long pig"—where is the difference?
KREOPHAGIST: Where is the difference? Can you ask me
such a question?
VEGETARIAN: It is uncommonly like the question you have
been asking _me_!
ANTHROPOPHAGIST: Your objection to human flesh is
altogether a sentimental one. You are a food faddist. It
is the universal law of nature that animals should prey
on one another.
KREOPHAGIST: It is not _my_ nature to eat my
fellow-beings.
VEGETARIAN: Why, that is the very same answer that I
made to _you_!
ANTHROPOPHAGIST: And pray, what would become of our
paupers, criminals, lunatics, and sick folk, if we did
not eat them? Would they not grow to a great residuum
and overrun the land? And the missionaries, too—are they
not "sent" us as food? And what right have you to the
name _omnivorous_, if you restrict your diet in this
way? Why "omnivorous"?