[250] Golden Rules of Social Philosophy: being a System of Ethics. 1826.
[251] A Dictionary of the Arts of Life and Civilisation. 1833. London: Sherwood & Co. It will be seen that the origin of his revolt from orthodox dietetics, given by himself, differs from that narrated in the Life from which we have quoted above. It is possible that both incidents may have equally affected him at the moment, but that the spectacle of the London slaughter-house remained most vividly impressed upon his mind.
[252] Million of Facts, p. 176. For the substance of the greater part of this biography, our acknowledgments are due to the researches of Mr. W. E. A. Axon, F.R.S.L., F.S.S.
[253] La Chute d’un Ange. Huitième Vision.
[254] Les Confidences, par Alphonse de Lamartine, Paris, 1849–51, quoted in Dietetic Reformer, August, 1881. It is in this book, too, that he commemorates some of the many atrocities perpetrated by schoolboys with impunity, or even with the connivance of their masters, for their amusement, upon the helpless victims of their unchecked cruelty of disposition.
[255] The question of kreophagy and anti-kreophagy had already been mooted, it appears, in the Institut, at the period of the great Revolution of 1789, as a legitimate consequence of the apparent general awakening of the human conscience, when slavery also was first publicly denounced. What was the result of the first raising of this question in the French Chamber of Savans does not appear, but, as Gleïzès remarks, we may easily divine it. One interesting fact was published by the discussion in the Deputies’ Chamber—viz., that in the year 1817, in Paris, the consumption of flesh was less than that of the year 1780 by 40,000,000lb., in proportion to the population (see Gleïzès, Thalysie, Quatrième Discours), a fact which can only mean that the rich, who support the butchers, had been forced by reduced means to live less carnivorously.
[256] In the same strain an eminent savan, Sir D. Brewster, has given expression to his feeling of aversion from the slaughter-house—a righteous feeling which (strange perversion of judgment) is so constantly repressed in spite of all the most forcible promptings of conscience and reason! These are his words: “But whatever races there be in other spheres, we feel sure that there must be one amongst whom there are no man-eaters—no heroes with red hands—no sovereigns with bloody hearts—and no statesmen who, leaving the people untaught, educate them for the scaffold. In the Decalogue of that community will stand pre-eminent, in letters of burnished gold, the highest of all social obligations—‘Thou shalt not kill, neither for territory, for fame, for lucre, nor for food, nor for raiment, nor for pleasure.’ The lovely forms of life, and sensation, and instinct, so delicately fashioned by the Master-hand, shall no longer be destroyed and trodden under foot, but shall be the objects of increasing love and admiration, the study of the philosopher, the theme of the poet, and the companions and auxiliaries of Man.”—More Worlds than One.
[257] Bible de l’Humanité—Redemption de la Nature, VI.
[258] Cf. a recently published Essay, in the form of a letter to the present Premier, Mr. Gladstone, entitled The Woman and the Age. The author, one of the most refined thinkers of our times, has at once admirably exposed the utter sham as well as cruelty of a vivisecting science, and demonstrated the necessary and natural results to the human race from its shameless outrage upon, and cynical contempt for, the first principles of morality.
[259] The Bird, by Jules Michelet. English Translation. Nelson, London, 1870. See, too, his eloquent exposure of the scientific or popular error which, denying conscious reason and intelligence, in order to explain the mental constitution of the non-human races (as well that of the higher mammals as of the inferior species), has invented the vague and mystifying term “instinct.”