It was to his pure dietary that the great Prison Reformer assigns his immunity, during so many years, from the deadly jail-fever, to the infection of which he fearlessly exposed himself in visiting those hotbeds of malaria—the filthy prisons of this country and of continental Europe. (See the correspondence of John Howard—passim.) Equally significant is the testimony of the eminent founder of Methodism whose almost unexampled energy and endurance, both of mind and body, during some fifty years of continuous persecution, both legal and popular, were supported (as he informs us in his Journals) mainly by abstinence from gross foods; while, in regard to Emanuel Swedenborg, if abstinence does not assume so prominent a place in his theological or other various writings as might have been expected from his special opinions, the cause of such silence must be referred not to personal addiction to an anti-spiritualistic nourishment (for he himself was notably frugal) but to preoccupation of mental faculties which seem to have been absorbed in the elaboration of his well-known spiritualistic system.
The limits of this work do not permit us to quote all the many writers of the eighteenth century whom philosophy, science, or profounder feeling urged incidentally to question the necessity or to suspect the barbarism of the Slaughter-House. But there are two names, amongst the highest in the whole range of English philosophic literature, whose expression of opinion may seem to be peculiarly noteworthy—the author of the Wealth of Nations and the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“It may, indeed, be doubted [writes the founder of the science of Political Economy] whether butchers’ meat is anywhere a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil (where butter is not to be had), it is known from experience, can, without any butchers’ meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet.”[196]
As for the reflections of the first of historians, who seems always carefully to guard himself from the expression of any sort of emotion not in keeping with the character of an impartial judge and unprejudiced spectator, but who, on the subject in question, cannot wholly repress the natural feeling of disgust, they are sufficiently significant. Gibbon is describing the manners of the Tartar tribes:—
“The thrones of Asia have been repeatedly overturned by the shepherds of the North, and their arms have spread terror and devastation over the most fertile and warlike countries of Europe. On this occasion, as well as on many others, the sober historian is forcibly awakened from a pleasing vision, and is compelled, with some reluctance, to confess that the pastoral manners, which have been adorned with the fairest attributes of peace and innocence, are much better adapted to the fierce and cruel habits of a military life.
“To illustrate this observation, I shall now proceed to consider a nation of shepherds and of warriors in the three important articles of (1) their diet, (2) their habitations, and (3) their exercises. 1. The corn, or even the rice, which constitutes the ordinary and wholesome food of a civilised people, can be obtained only by the patient toil of the husbandman. Some of the happy savages who dwell between the tropics are plentifully nourished by the liberality of Nature; but in the climates of the North a nation of shepherds is reduced to their flocks and herds. The skilful practitioners of the medical art will determine (if they are able to determine) how far the temper of the human mind may be affected by the use of animal or of vegetable food; and whether the common association of carnivorous and cruel deserves to be considered in any other light than that of an innocent, perhaps a salutary, prejudice of humanity. Yet if it be true that the sentiment of compassion is imperceptibly weakened by the sight and practice of domestic cruelty, we may observe that the horrid objects which are disguised by the arts of European refinement are exhibited in their naked and most disgusting simplicity in the tent of a Tartar shepherd. The Oxen or the Sheep are slaughtered by the same hand from which they were accustomed to receive their daily food, and the bleeding limbs are served, with very little preparation, on the table of their unfeeling murderers.”[197]
To the poets, who claim to be the interpreters and priests of Nature, we might, with justness, look for celebration of the anti-materialist living. Unhappily we too generally look in vain. The prophet-poets—Hesiod, Kalidâsa, Milton, Thomson, Shelley, Lamartine—form a band more noble than numerous. Of those who, not having entered the very sanctuary of the temple of humanitarianism, have been content to officiate in its outer courts, Burns and Cowper occupy a prominent place. That the latter, who felt so keenly
“The persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds