Moral and Political Philosophy_ (1785). He founds moral obligation
upon principles of utility. In politics he asserts the grounds of the
duties of rulers and ruled to be based upon the same far-reaching
consideration, and upon this principle he maintains that as soon
as any Government has proved itself corrupt or negligent of the
public good, whatever may have been the alleged legitimacy of its
original authority, the right of the governed to put an end to it is
established. “The final view of all national politics,” he affirms,
“is [ought to be] to produce the greatest quantity of happiness.”
The comparative boldness, indeed, of certain of his disquisitions
on Government alarmed not a little the political and ecclesiastical
dignitaries of the time. His adhesion to the programme of Clarkson and
the anti-slavery “fanatics” (as that numerically insignificant band of
reformers was styled) did not tend, it may be presumed, to counteract
the damaging effects of his political philosophy.
In his _Natural Theology_ (1802), his best theological production, he
labours to establish the fact of benevolent design from observation
of the various phenomena of nature and life. Whatever estimate may be
formed of the success of this undertaking, there can be no question
of the ability and eloquence of the accomplished pleader; and the
book proves him, at least, to have acquired a surprising amount
of physiological and anatomical knowledge. It is justly described
by Sir J. Mackintosh as “the wonderful work of a man who, after
sixty, had studied anatomy in order to write it.” Of the _Evidences_
(1790-94)--the most popularly known of his writings--the considerable
literary merit is in somewhat striking contrast, in regard to clearness
and simplicity of style, with the ordinary productions of the
evidential school.
We are concerned now with the _Moral and Political Philosophy_. It
has been already stated that it is based upon the principles of
utilitarianism. As for personal moral conduct, he justly considered it
to be vastly influenced by early custom; or, as he expresses it, the
art of life consists in the right “setting of our habits.”
On the subjoined examination of the question of the lawfulness or
otherwise of flesh-eating, his ultimate refuge in an alleged biblical
authority (forced upon him, apparently, by the necessity of his
position rather than by personal inclination) confirms rather than
weakens his preceding candid _admissions_, which sufficiently establish
our position:--
“A right to the flesh of animals. This is a _very different claim_
from the former [‘a right to the fruits or vegetable produce of
the earth’]. _Some_ excuse seems necessary for the pain and loss
which we occasion to [other] animals by restraining them of their
liberty, mutilating their bodies, and, at last, putting an end to
their lives for our pleasure or convenience.
“The reasons alleged in vindication of this practice are the
following--that the several species of animals being created to
prey upon one another[187] affords a kind of analogy to prove that
the human species were intended to feed upon them; that, if let
alone, they would overrun the earth, and exclude mankind from the
occupation of it;[188] that they are requited for what they suffer
at our hands by our care and protection.
“Upon which reasons I would observe that the analogy contended
for _is extremely lame_, since [the carnivorous] animals have no
power to support life by any other means, and _since we have, for
the whole human species might subsist entirely upon fruit, pulse,
herbs, and roots, as many tribes of Hindus[189] actually do_. The
two other reasons may be valid reasons, as far as they go, for,
no doubt, if men had been supported entirely by vegetable food a
great part of those animals who die to furnish our tables would
never have lived[190] but they by no means justify our right over
the lives of other animals to the extent to which we exercise it.
What danger is there, _e.g._, of fish interfering with us in the
occupation of their element, or what do we contribute to their
support or preservation?
“_It seems to me that it would be difficult to defend this right
by any arguments which the light and order of Nature afford_, and
that we are beholden for it to the permission recorded in Scripture
(_Gen._ ix., 1, 2, 3). To Adam and his posterity had been granted,
at the creation, ‘every green herb for meat,’ and nothing more.
In the last clause of the passage now produced the old grant is
recited and extended to the flesh of animals--‘even as the green
herb, have I given you all things.’ But this was not until after
the Flood. The inhabitants of the antediluvian world had therefore
no such permission that we know of. Whether they actually refrained
from the flesh of animals is another question. Abel, we read, was
a keeper of sheep, and for what purpose he kept them, except for
food, is difficult to say (unless it were sacrifice). Might not,
however, some of the stricter sects among the antediluvians be
scrupulous as to this point? And might not Noah and his family
be of this description? For, it is not probable that God should
publish a permission to authorise a practice which had never been
disputed.”[191]
Thus far as regards the _moral_ aspect of the subject. Dealing with the
social and economical view, Paley, untrammelled by professional views,
is more decided. In his chapter, _Of Population and Provision, &c._, he
writes:--
“The natives of Hindustan being confined, by the laws of their
religion, to the use of vegetable food, and requiring little except
rice, which the country produces in plentiful crops; and food, in
warm climates, composing the only want of life, these countries are
populous under all the injuries of a despotic, and the agitations
of an unsettled, Government. If any revolution, or what would be
called perhaps _refinement of manners (!)_, should generate in
these people a taste for the flesh of animals, similar to what
prevails amongst the Arabian hordes--should introduce flocks and
herds into grounds which are now covered with corn--should teach
them to account a certain portion of this species of food amongst
the necessaries of life--the population from this single change
would suffer in a few years a great diminution, and this diminution
would follow in spite of every effort of the laws, or even of any
improvement that might take place in their civil condition. In
Ireland the simplicity of living alone maintains a considerable
degree of population under great defects of police, industry,
and commerce.... Next to the mode of living, we are to consider
‘the quantity of provision suited to that mode, which is either
raised in the country or imported into it,’ for this is the order
in which we assigned the causes of population and undertook to
treat of them. Now, if we measure the quantity of provision by the
number of human bodies it will support in due health and vigour,
this quantity, the extent and quality of the soil from which it
is raised being given, will depend greatly upon the _kind_. For
instance, a piece of ground capable of supplying animal food
sufficient for the subsistence of ten persons _would sustain, at
least, the double of that number with grain, roots, and milk_.
“The first resource of savage life is in the flesh of wild animals.
Hence the numbers amongst savage nations, compared with the tract
of country which they occupy, are universally small, because this
species of provision is, of all others, supplied in the slenderest
proportion. The next step was the invention of pasturage, or the
rearing of flocks and herds of tame animals. This alteration
added to the stock of provision much. But the last and _principal
improvement was to follow, viz., tillage, or the artificial
production of corn, esculent plants, and roots_. This discovery,
whilst it changed the quality of human food, augmented the quantity
in a vast proportion.
“So far as the state of population is governed and limited by
the quantity of provision, perhaps there is no single cause that
affects it so powerfully as the kind and quality of food which
chance or usage hath introduced into a country. In England,
notwithstanding the produce of the soil has been of late
considerably increased by the enclosure of wastes and the adoption,
in many places, of a more successful husbandry, yet we do not
observe a corresponding addition to the number of inhabitants, the
reason of which appears to me to be the more general consumption
of animal food amongst us. Many ranks of people whose ordinary
diet was, in the last century, prepared almost entirely from milk,
roots, and vegetables, now require every day a considerable portion
of the flesh of animals. _Hence a great part of the richest lands
of the country are converted to pasturage._ Much also of the
bread-corn, which went directly to the nourishment of human bodies,
now only contributes to it by fattening the flesh of sheep and
oxen. _The mass and volume of provisions are hereby diminished_,
and what is gained in the amelioration of the soil is lost in the
quality of the produce.
“This consideration teaches us that tillage, as an object of
national care and encouragement, is universally preferable to
pasturage, because the kind of provision which it yields goes
much farther in the sustentation of human life. Tillage is also
recommended by this additional advantage--that it _affords
employment to a much more numerous peasantry_. Indeed pasturage
seems to be the art of a nation, either imperfectly civilised, as
are many of the tribes which cultivate it in the internal parts
of Asia, or of a nation, like Spain, declining from its summit by
luxury and inactivity.”[192]
Elsewhere Paley asserts that “luxury in dress or furniture is
universally preferable to luxury _in eating_, because the articles
which constitute the one are more the production of human art and
industry than those which supply the other.”
XXXII.
ST. PIERRE. 1737-1814.
Principally known as the author of the most charming of all idyllic
romances--_Paul et Virginie_. Beginning his career as civil engineer
he afterwards entered the French army. A quarrel with his official
superiors forced him to seek employment elsewhere, and he found it
in the Russian service, where his scientific ability received due
recognition.
Encouraged by the esteem in which he was held, he formed the project
of establishing a colony on the Caspian shores, which should be under
just and equal laws. St. Pierre submitted the scheme to the Russian
Minister, who, as we should be apt to presume, did not receive it too
favourably. He then went to Poland in the vain expectation of aiding
the people of that hopelessly distracted country in throwing off the
foreigners’ yoke. Failing in this undertaking, and despairing, for
the time, of the cause of freedom, we next find him in Berlin and
in Vienna. He had also previously visited Holland, in which great
refuge of freedom he had been received with hospitality. In Paris,
upon his return to France, his project of a free colony found better
reception than in St. Petersburg--owing, perhaps, to the not altogether
disinterested sympathy of the Government with the recently revolted
American colonies. To further his plans he accepted an official post in
the Ile de France, intending eventually to proceed to Madagascar, where
was to be realised his long-cherished idea. On the voyage he discovered
that his associates had formed a very different design from his
own--to engage in the slave traffic. Separating from these nefarious
speculators, he landed in the Ile de France, where he remained two
years. It is to the experiences of this part of his life that we owe
his _Paul et Virginie_, the scenes of which are laid in that tropical
island.
Returning home once again, he made the acquaintance of D’Alembert
and of other leading men of letters in Paris, and, particularly,
of Rousseau, his philosophical master. At the period of the Great
Revolution of 1789, St. Pierre lost his post as superintendent of the
Royal Botanical Gardens under the old Bourbon Government, and he found
himself reduced to poverty; and although his sympathies were with the
party of constitutional, though not of radical, reform, the supremacy
of the extreme revolutionists (1792-1794) exposed him to some hazard by
reason of his known deistic convictions. Upon the establishment of the
reactionary revolution of the Empire, St. Pierre recovered his former
post, and, with the empty honour of the Imperial Cross, he received the
more solid benefit of a pension and other emoluments.
His writings have been collected and published in two quarto volumes
(Paris, 1836). Of these, after his celebrated romance, perhaps the most
popular is _La Chaumière Indienne_ (“The Indian or Hindu Cottage”). His
principal productions are _Etudes de la Nature_ (“Studies of Nature”),
_Vœux d’un Solitaire_ (“Aspirations of a Recluse”), _Voyage à L’Ile
de France_ (“Voyage to Mauritius”), and _L’Arcadie_ (“Arcadia”).
His merits consist in a certain refinement of feeling, in charming
eloquence in description of natural beauty, and in the humane spirit
which breathes in his writings. Of the _Paul et Virginie_ he tells us--
“I have proposed to myself great designs in that little work....
I have desired to reunite to the beauty of Nature, as seen in the
tropics, the moral beauty of a small society of human beings. I
proposed to myself thereby to demonstrate several great truths;
amongst others this--that our happiness consists in living
according to Nature and Virtue.”
He assures us that the principal characters and events he describes
are by no means only the imaginings of romance. In truth, it seems
difficult to believe that the genius of the author alone could have
impressed so wonderful an air of reality upon merely fictitious scenes.
The popularity of the story was secured at once in the author’s own
country, and it rapidly spread throughout Europe. _Paul et Virginie_
was successively translated into English, Italian, German, Dutch,
Polish, Russian, and Spanish. It became the fashion for mothers to give
to their children the names of its hero and heroine, and well would
it have been had they also adopted for them that method of innocent
living which is the real, if too generally unrecognised, secret of the
fascinating power of the book.
It is thus that he eloquently calls to remembrance the _natural_ feasts
of his young heroine and hero:--
“Amiable children! thus in innocence did you pass your first days.
How often in this spot have your mothers, pressing you in their
arms, thanked Heaven for the consolation you were preparing for
them in their old age, and for the happiness of seeing you enter
upon life under so happy auguries! How often, under the shadow
of these rocks, have I shared, with them, your out-door repasts
_which had cost no animals their lives_. Gourds full of milk, of
newly-laid eggs, of rice cakes upon banana leaves, baskets laden
with potatoes, with mangoes, with oranges, with pomegranates,
with bananas, with dates, with ananas, offered at once the most
wholesome meats, the most beautiful colours, and the most agreeable
juices. The conversation was as refined and gentle as their food.”
The humaneness of their manners had attracted to the charming arbour,
which they had formed for themselves, all kinds of beautiful birds,
who sought there their daily meals and the caresses of their human
protectors. Our readers will not be displeased to be reminded of this
charming scene:--
“Virginie loved to repose upon the slope of this fountain, which
was decorated with a pomp at once magnificent and wild. Often
would she come there to wash the household linen beneath the shade
of two cocoa-nut trees. Sometimes she led her goats to feed in this
place; and, while she was preparing cheese from their milk, she
pleased herself in watching them as they browsed the herbage upon
the precipitous sides of the rocks, and supported themselves in
mid-air upon one of the jutting points as upon a pedestal. Paul,
seeing that this spot was loved by Virginie, brought from the
neighbouring forest the nests of all sorts of birds. The fathers
and mothers of these birds followed their little ones, and came
and established themselves in this new colony. Virginie would
distribute to them from time to time grains of rice, maize, and
millet. As soon as she appeared, the blackbirds, the _bengalis_,
whose flight is so gentle, the cardinals, whose plumage is of the
colour of fire, quitted their bushes; parroquets, green as emerald,
descended from the neighbouring lianas, partridges ran along under
the grass--all advanced pell-mell up to her feet like domestic
hens. Paul and she delighted themselves with their transports of
joy, with their eager appetites, and with their loves.”
In his views upon national education, St. Pierre invites the serious
attention of legislators and educators to the importance of accustoming
the young to the nourishment prescribed by Nature:--
“They [the true instructors of the people] will accustom children
to the vegetable _régime_. The peoples living upon vegetable foods,
are, of all men, the handsomest, the most vigorous, the least
exposed to diseases and to passions, and they whose lives last
longest. Such, in Europe, are a large proportion of the Swiss. The
greater part of the peasantry who, in every country, form the most
vigorous portion of the people, eat very little flesh-meat. The
Russians have multiplied periods of fasting and days of abstinence,
from which even the soldiers are not exempt; and yet they resist
all kinds of fatigues. The negroes, who undergo so many hard blows
in our colonies, live upon manioc, potatoes, and maize alone. The
Brahmins of India, who frequently reach the age of one hundred
years, eat only vegetable foods. It was from the Pythagorean sect
that issued Epaminondas, so celebrated by his virtues; Archytas,
by his genius for mathematics and mechanics; Milo of Crotona, by
his strength of body. Pythagoras himself was the finest man of his
time, and, without dispute, the most enlightened, since he was the
father of philosophy amongst the Greeks. Inasmuch as the non-flesh
diet introduces many virtues and excludes none, it will be well to
bring up the young upon it, since it has so happy an influence upon
the beauty of the body and upon the tranquility of the mind. This
regimen prolongs childhood, and, by consequence, human life.[193]
“I have seen an instance of it in a young Englishman aged fifteen,
and who did not appear to be twelve years of age. He was of a most
interesting figure, of the most robust health, and of the most
sweet disposition. He was accustomed to take very long walks. He
was never put out of temper by any annoyance that might happen. His
father, Mr. Pigott, told me that he had brought him up entirely
upon the Pythagorean regimen, the good effects of which he had
known by his own experience. He had formed the project of employing
a part of his fortune, which was considerable, in establishing
in English America a society of dietary reformers who should be
engaged in educating, under the same regimen, the children of
the colonists in all the arts which bear upon agriculture. Would
that this educational scheme, worthy of the best and happiest
times of Antiquity, might succeed! Physically, it suits a warlike
people no less than an agricultural one. The Persian children, of
the time of Cyrus, and by his orders, were nourished upon bread,
water, and vegetables.... It was with these children, become men,
that Cyrus made the conquest of Asia. I observe that Lycurgus
introduced a great part of the physical and moral regimen of the
Persian children into the education of those of the Lacedemonians.”
(_Etudes._)[194]
* * * * *
Of the many practical witnesses of this period, more or less
interesting, for the sufficiency, or rather superiority, of the
reformed regimen, four names stand out in prominent relief--Franklin,
Howard, Swedenborg, Wesley--prominent either for scientific ability or
for philanthropic zeal. To his early resolution to betake himself to
frugal living, Benjamin Franklin, then in a printer’s office in Boston,
attributes mainly his future success in life.[195]
It was to his pure dietary that the great Prison Reformer assigns
his immunity, during so many years, from the deadly jail-fever, to
the infection of which he fearlessly exposed himself in visiting
those hotbeds of _malaria_--the filthy prisons of this country and of
continental Europe. (See the correspondence of John Howard--_passim_.)
Equally significant is the testimony of the eminent founder of
Methodism whose almost unexampled energy and endurance, both of mind
and body, during some fifty years of continuous persecution, both legal
and popular, were supported (as he informs us in his _Journals_) mainly
by abstinence from gross foods; while, in regard to Emanuel Swedenborg,
if abstinence does not assume so prominent a place in his theological
or other various writings as might have been expected from his special
opinions, the cause of such silence must be referred not to personal
addiction to an _anti-spiritualistic_ nourishment (for he himself was
notably frugal) but to preoccupation of mental faculties which seem to
have been absorbed in the elaboration of his well-known spiritualistic
system.
The limits of this work do not permit us to quote all the many writers
of the eighteenth century whom philosophy, science, or profounder
feeling urged _incidentally_ to question the necessity or to suspect
the barbarism of the Slaughter-House. But there are two names, amongst
the highest in the whole range of English philosophic literature, whose
expression of opinion may seem to be peculiarly noteworthy--the author
of the _Wealth of Nations_ and the historian of the _Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire_.
“It may, indeed, be doubted [writes the founder of the science of
Political Economy] whether butchers’ meat is _anywhere_ a necessary
of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese,
and butter, or oil (where butter is not to be had), it is known
from experience, can, _without any butchers’ meat, afford the most
plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most
invigorating diet_.”[196]
As for the reflections of the first of historians, who seems always
carefully to guard himself from the expression of any sort of
emotion not in keeping with the character of an impartial judge and
unprejudiced spectator, but who, on the subject in question, cannot
wholly repress the _natural_ feeling of disgust, they are sufficiently
significant. Gibbon is describing the manners of the Tartar tribes:--
“The thrones of Asia have been repeatedly overturned by the
shepherds of the North, and their arms have spread terror and
devastation over the most fertile and warlike countries of Europe.
On this occasion, as well as on many others, the sober historian is
forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision, and is compelled, with
some reluctance, to confess that the pastoral manners, which have
been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence,
are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a
military life.