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.

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 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? 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?

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

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

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

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

Vegetarian: It is uncommonly like the question you have been asking me!

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

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

Vegetarian: Why, that is the very same answer that I made to you!

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

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

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

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

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