Vegetarian: Well, I suppose we should take care not to be without them, or something just as good.
Alarmist: How could we do that, if there were no carcases to supply us with hides, bone, and tallow? In your devotion to an ideal you seem to forget that if your principles prevailed, we might wake up some fine morning to find ourselves confronted by the dislocation of the boot trade, the bookbinding trade, the harness trade, and a hundred others. Thousands of men and women would be thrown out of work, and we should soon have no boots, no portmanteaus, no soap, no candles, no knife-handles. It would be a downright relapse into barbarism.
Vegetarian: But, happily, your lurid picture is based on the false assumption that vegetarianism would come about by a sudden and instantaneous conversion. That is not the way in which great changes are accomplished. They are a matter of years and centuries, not of days and weeks; and the "fine morning" you spoke of will be a gradual morning of very extensive duration.
Alarmist: Well, but that is only putting off the evil day—it would come at last.
Vegetarian: But would not something else have also been coming meantime? Would not the demand, in this as in all other usages of life, have produced the corresponding supply? There is no need, however, to speculate as to what would happen, because it is happening already.
Alarmist: What is happening?
Vegetarian: The articles which you named are being supplied in substitutes from the vegetable kingdom. Slowly and tentatively at first, as is inevitable while vegetarians are so few in numbers; but vegetarian boots, vegetarian soap, and vegetarian candles are now in the market, and as the movement spreads, the demand will be proportionately greater. So pray do not alarm yourself about the dislocation of trade, for the whole change, great as it is, will come to pass imperceptibly, and will never bring a moment's inconvenience to anyone. Mankind, as it happens, is not so helpless, so uninventive, so literally "hidebound," as to let its progress be dependent on skins, bones, and guts.
There is a good deal of unintended humour, too, in some of the difficulties that are alleged. Thus, vegetarians are often asked how the land could be fertilised without the use of animal manure, it being apparently forgotten that ex nihilo nihil fit, and that animals can only return to the land in manure what they have previously taken from it in food; also that by our absurdly wasteful drainage system we are all the time poisoning our seas and rivers with a mass of sewage which would be amply sufficient for the soil. "Let the land," says Mr. William Hoyle, "only receive, in the shape of manure, the sewage and refuse from the teeming population of our towns and villages, in addition to the other means which are applied to it, and let it be properly drained and cultivated, and there is hardly any limit to its power of production."[[45]]
But it is superfluous to spend time in answering such questions, 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]]