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]]