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? This brings us back to the starting-point of the present chapter, the distinction 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 -isms, a part of the great humanitarian impulse of the past hundred years.
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; 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 vegetarian 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 succeeding 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 modern times.
STRUCTURAL EVIDENCE
We have seen, then, that vegetarianism, though new as a propagandist doctrine, has its historical record; but if we wish thoroughly to understand 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 prejudices 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 Linnæus 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 kernels 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.'"[[5]]
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 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 inference 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."[[6]]
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.