In the five preceding chapters I have advanced a number of reasons for thinking that the natural diet of man is vegetarian or fruitarian, and have endeavoured to show why flesh-eating is injurious. We saw that, from anatomical structure, from physiological function, from chemical analysis, for hygienic reasons, and because of the past experience of nations and individuals—for all these reasons man should abstain from meat. In the present chapter I shall adduce a number of miscellaneous arguments, tending to show that flesh is not man’s natural food; and that he cannot make it an article of his diet without violating many of the laws of his organisation—mental and moral, as well as physiological. These laws are important, also, and have their rightful place, just as mental and moral considerations have their place in any other question; and I shall accordingly consider them here.

There is first of all the humanitarian argument. This argument is perfectly legitimate, so far as it goes, and a most forceful one. The idea of taking life unnecessarily is very repellant to some—those who have not become hardened, and who have thought of this matter at all. To see a cartload of young animals going to the slaughter-house is a sad if not a disgusting sight—especially when we consider that these animals are soon to be cut up, and made into human food! The ill-treatment which the animals receive, during shipment, is certainly not in favour of their flesh being in any too good condition when it is received at the slaughter-house; and, if mental conditions count for anything, in their effect upon the composition of the blood and tissue juices, there is very good reason for thinking that their bodies are pretty well poisoned before they are killed—even if they were healthy when they left the stock-farm. But, apart from such considerations, every animal has its right to live; the ox and the calf, and the sheep, and even the swine, has its mental life, just as man; and there is a universal life running throughout the animal kingdom, which it is no part of man’s duty to take needlessly. This brings me to a very important factor in the argument. It is the taking of life needlessly which the vegetarian protests against so strongly. If it were necessary to kill these animals; if man could not live without flesh, then killing and eating would be perfectly justifiable. It would simply be a case of the survival of the fittest, and man would be entitled to kill and eat other animals, just as the carnivora do. But it is not necessary in any degree. Man can live perfectly well without meat of any kind; and not only live as well, but far better! My arguments in the chapter devoted to the hygiene of this subject should prove that to the satisfaction of the reader. Man can live without animal flesh; consequently the eating of this flesh is purely to gratify an appetite—and a perverted appetite at that. No normal appetite could possibly crave flesh of any kind. So that there is no possible excuse for the killing and eating of animals, than this—except, of course, ignorance. After all, that is the greatest factor!

It is against this taking of life unnecessarily that the vegetarian protests not the taking of life at all. Besides, there is a difference between killing a highly organised and sensitive animal, and one far lower in the scale of Evolution. Shedding the blood of such animals is against all normal instincts. Said a lady once, to a gentleman who was eating beef: “How can you eat a thing that looks out of the eyes?” The very plaintiveness, coupled with the helplessness of such animals, should inspire a certain pity in the breasts of all who have any humanitarian instincts.

This aspect of the controversy throws a different and a more rational light upon this question. It has frequently been contended, e.g., that, if this humanitarian argument were carried far enough, it would become absurd, for the reason that every drop of water we drink, and every breath of air we breathe contains living animals, which we kill within our bodies! Moreover, every vegetable we cut or pick, takes life (such as it is) and consequently this argument cannot be carried to its logical conclusion, and is consequently worthless!

The position I have indicated above answers this objection. If we cannot live without taking the lives of certain animalculÆ, or that of certain plants, then we must take their lives (for the most part, be it noted, unconsciously). But there is a great difference between this and taking the lives of highly organised animals intentionally and voluntarily. Besides, the one is necessary, the other not. As I said before, if meat were a necessary article of diet, there could be no possible objection to making it an article of food; but it is not necessary. That is the crux.

Further, it can be shown that, on a fruitarian diet, it is not necessary to take the life even of the fruit eaten! If a cabbage be cut, e.g., we thereby kill the cabbage—its psychic life, that is. The same is true of all other vegetables. But it will be observed that, when fruits are eaten, nothing is destroyed; no life taken unnecessarily. Fruits, when they are ripe, fall from the tree, and rot upon the ground—thus exposing the seed, and allowing it to become buried in the soil. It will be seen that the pulp of the fruit is of no further use to the seed; it has nourished it up to the time of its falling to the ground, but thenceforward, it is virtually useless to the seed. So that we might with justice feel that we were taking no life at all in eating this pulp of the fruit—which, again, would seem to indicate that fruit is man’s natural diet.[31] However, as I said before, I do not think it is necessary to split hairs so finely on this question. The valid ground to take is that it is wrong and cruel to take highly organised life uselessly; and I do not think that such an attitude is in any way open to criticism.

I may as well answer, in this place, one objection that has been frequently raised against vegetarians by the meat-eaters, which is that, if we did not eat meat, we should soon be overrun by the various animals, and there would be no room for man upon the earth! They would eventually crowd man out! This supposed argument is really absurd. In the first place, hardly one-tenth of the animals now brought into the world would be raised. They are now especially bred for eating purposes, and if the demand decreased, the supply would decrease also. Further, how is it that we are not overrun by wild animals of all sorts? We have never been in any danger from them, somehow; but it has invariably been found that they tend to recede before the advance of civilisation. Many survive, to be sure, but Nature seems to take care that their numbers are not unduly increased, so as to be a menace to the human race. If this be true of wild animals—which might really be a menace to the human race, if their numbers were sufficiently increased—it is certainly all the more true of the harmless domestic animals. Nature would

see to it that man was not overrun by animals of any sort, as she always has in the past. People need not worry about the future welfare of the bovine race, if they would only be a little more humane in their treatment of its present representatives!

There is an ethical and an Æsthetic aspect of diet, just as there is a hygienic and chemical aspect. There is a wider view of this question of diet than merely that of supplying the body with pabulum for the tissues; the body itself cannot be built equally well from all food-stuffs, but the body is cleaner and internally purer on some foods than upon others. The keeping of the body in a clean, pure state—a fit tenant for the soul—is in itself an aspect of the diet problem that should affect us most keenly. It is not as though food had no effect upon mental life and morals. Far from it. There is the closest inter-relation. The whole process of ingesting food is disgusting, in one sense, but that is no excuse for choosing, in consequence, carrion and offal to feed upon! Think of the condition of a man’s stomach who has eaten a regular table-d’hÔte dinner, and compare it, in the mind’s eye, with the stomach of a man who has dined on peaches and Brazil nuts! Were one to stop and think of what meat is, and what it was, it is doubtful if one could eat it. It is merely dead and decaying flesh—flesh from the body of an animal. There is nothing more repellent to think about than the “scorched corpses,” as Bernard Shaw calls them, which grace the tables of so-called civilised people. The sight, the smell, the taste, all are repellent. Only by the fact that they are covered up, and their true nature concealed by cooking, and basting, and pickling, and peppering and salting can we eat them at all. If we were naturally carnivorous animals, we should delight in bloodshed and gore of all kind! We should go out and kill our dinner, just as we now eat it; and the one would seem no more repulsive to us than the other. Carnivorous animals secure their food in this way, and so should we, if we were naturally carnivorous. We should eat our flesh warm and quivering—just as it comes from the cow! But instead of this, what do we find? That the majority of people in civilised nations will not even consent to go near a slaughter-house! And when they do go, they come away sickened at the sights and the odours which they encounter. Take for example the following extracts from a diary—the notes being descriptive of a Chicago meat market:—

And so would anyone else who had witnessed like scenes! I say witnessed them merely: how would it be if each one had to perform the actual process of killing, before he could have a piece of his “delicious beef-steak”? How would our society women like to spend the morning in a slaughter-house, before they could procure their meat for the evening dinner? And yet someone has to do this work—work disgusting and degrading enough to be below the lowest of men, and fit only for the lowest of animals. The butcher does this, you say; he is paid for it? Very true, but he only learns to do this work after many days and even weeks of revulsion; and it is invariably against his nature to do it. And this brings me to one very important factor—the degradation of the butcher. 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 hangman’s) is that of the butcher. He becomes depraved mentally, morally and physically. His is a dangerous business, and it is well known that slight cuts and scratches, which, in the average man, would amount to very little, frequently cause blood-poisoning and death to the butcher. Their work brutalises them, too—as it necessarily must. This is well known; and butchers are forbidden to sit in a jury, in certain countries, as we know, because of the perversion of their moral natures. And all this because certain persons, under the delusion that they “must have meat” demand this from these men! The crime, and the ugly, dirty work in connection with meat-eating, does not rest upon the butchers—who are paid for their work, and would doubtless starve, lacking it—it rests upon the eaters of meat throughout the country! As the Whitechapel butcher remarked to the flesh-eating gentlemen: “It’s such as you makes such as us!” Yes; the stain rests upon the flesh-eaters, not upon the flesh providers!

But there is another argument in favour of the vegetarian diet, and more especially in favour of the fruitarian diet, as against meat-eating. It is that any given area of land will supply far more food per acre in the one case than in the other. When the soil is given up to the feeding of cattle, upon which man is to feed, the given area of land would supply far less nutriment, so to speak, than would the same soil, if grains were raised upon it; and that would give less, in turn, than if fruit-trees were grown upon it. Dr Smith pointed out this fact in his “Fruits and Farinacea” years ago; and stated that twenty times the population could be supported upon a diet of grains, coming from a given limited area, than could be supplied, if that area were devoted to the raising of cattle. And far more would this be the case if fruits were grown upon this same area. It is safe to say that, if one person could be fed from a certain area of land, provided he ate the meat it produced, ten could be fed from the same area, upon grains and cereals, and twenty upon the fruits and nuts such an area could provide. This fact is in itself of great importance and significance. Although the time is doubtless far distant when man will have to figure so closely on his land space for feeding the people, that time must come some day; and it would be well to know that many more persons can be fed from the same area of ground upon one diet than upon another.

These and many other arguments could be urged against the practice of meat-eating. They are all valid arguments, though all of them, in my estimation, subordinate to the hygienic argument. If it were necessary to kill animals, in order to live, I should have no compunction in doing so; but as it is not necessary, I must protest against this useless waste of life; and more especially so since this meat is positively pernicious and harmful to the system. There is a sort of half-formulated idea in men’s minds that they must have meat, because the blood is red, and because the blood of their own bodies is red; and they think that, by eating large quantities of meat, they can increase the quantity and improve the quality of their own blood—thereby curing anÆmia, etc.! Of course there is no foundation at all for this superstition. In the first place, the tables of the chemical values of the various foods show us conclusively that meat is far less nutritious than many other articles of diet; while it contains, in addition, certain poisons which are extremely harmful to the system. Further, all food, no matter what its nature, is converted into a creamy substance known as chyle before it is appropriated by the system; and, no matter what the food may be, it is resolved into this cream-coloured chyle before it is digested. Where, then, is the “good, red blood” of the meat? And I have previously shown that, although there are practically no chemical differences between the chyme formed from vegetable and that formed from animal substances, nevertheless, the vital properties of the chyme vary greatly—and are in favour of the vegetable foods. Finally, I would point out that, if this argument were sound, we should not eat the flesh of animals, for the reason that “it most nearly resembles our own,” but would become cannibals and eat human flesh—since that most nearly resembles our tissues! And yet it has been found by actual experiment, that, so far from being wholesome food, human flesh is exceedingly indigestible and unwholesome!

If flesh-eating is as harmful as I have been endeavouring to show, however, how comes it about that the practice is so universal? And how did the practice of flesh-eating originate, in the first place? These are questions often asked of vegetarians, and there is a simple answer to both of them. Flesh-eating is all but universal, simply because people follow habit and custom blindly, without thinking of their actions in the least—and, strangely enough, on this most vital of all questions—food and diet. On most other topics, people are quite capable of thinking for themselves; but in this question, they take not the slightest interest! So long as the food tastes nice, that is all they care to think about it; and the actual preparation of the food, and all questions concerning its composition and combination with other foods, they are content to leave to an ignorant Chinaman or Irish cook, who knows as much about the physiology and hygiene of dietetics as a cow of the constitution of the moon. It is really amazing that this should be so. It shows, of course, that people have not really thought about their food in this light, and realised the tremendous consequences of a false and perverted diet, or the benefits of a simple and nutritious one. Flesh-eating doubtless sprang into existence ages ago, at a time when little or no other food was to be obtained, and they had to live upon it or starve. But we are not called upon to explain the origin of meat-eating, as a matter of fact, any more than we are the origin of alcohol-drinking. We must take conditions as we find them, and endeavour to better them, as best we can. It is certain that animals can be taught to eat meat, quite contrary to their natural dietetic habits—as indicated by their structure, and by the unperverted dietetic habits of the rest of their species. Thus, horses have been taught to eat meat and drink beer; and, at certain seasons, the horses on the coast of Norway are said to dash into the sea, and endeavour to catch fishes in their mouths. Dogs and cats can be taught to like alcoholic beverages of all kinds; and similar perversions of taste in the animal world might be cited by the score. If animals can thus be trained to like foods and drinks of this character, certainly man can be taught to like and to eat and drink them also; and it is doubtless due to this fact that the habit of meat-eating originated. Once perverted, the appetite would have a tendency to stay perverted, by reason of heredity; and in any case the environment and education of the growing child would be quite sufficient to engender the desire for meat—especially if the individual were brought up under the notion that he “cannot live” without meat, and that it is a most essential article of his diet! The medical profession is to blame for much of this perverted reasoning, and the public for blindly following it, without investigating its doctrines for themselves. Only when this is done can we hope for a widespread and radical reform—one which will revolutionise diet and cookery and spread health and harmony among the human race and the animal kingdom—as well as restore man to a position of elevated spiritual insight.