[310] “The converse of all this is true. He is certainly taught by example, and by temptation, and prompted by (what he thinks is) interest.”—Note by Ritson in Abstinence from Flesh a Moral Duty.
[311] Among living enlightened medical authorities of the present day, Dr. B. W. Richardson, F.R.S., perhaps the most eminent hygeist and sanitary reformer in the country now living, has delivered his testimony in no doubtful terms to the superiority of the purer diet. In his recent publication Salutisland he has banished the slaughter-house, with all its abominations, from that model State. See also his Hygieia.
[312] L’Art de Prolonger la Vie et de Conserver la Santé: ou, Traité d’Hygiène. Par M. Pressavin, Gradué de l’Université de Paris; Membre du Collège Royal de Chirurgie de Lyon, et Ancien Demonstrateur en Matière Medicale-Chirurgicale. A Lyon, 1786.
[313] Die Eleusische Fest.
[314] Der Alpenjäger. See also Göthe—Italienische Reise, XXIII. 42; Aus Meinem Leben, XXIV. 23; Werther’s Leiden; Brief 12.
[315] Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (page 311). By Jeremy Bentham, M.A., Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, &c.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1876. It must be added that the assumption (on the same page on which this cogent reasoning is found), that man has the right to kill his fellow-beings, for the purpose of feeding upon their flesh, is one more illustration of the strange inconsistencies into which even so generally just and independent a thinker as the author of the Book of Fallacies may be forced by the “logic of circumstances.” Among recent notable Essays upon the Rights of the Lower Animals (the right to live excepted) may here be mentioned—Animals and their Masters, by Sir Arthur Helps (1873), and The Rights of an Animal, by Mr. E. B. Nicholson, librarian of the Bodleian, Oxford (1877).
[316] Compare the Voyages of Volney, one of the most philosophical of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, who himself for some time seems to have lived on the non-flesh diet. Attributing the ferocious character of the American savage, “hunter and butcher, who, in every animal sees but an object of prey, and who is become an animal of the species of wolves and of tigers,” to such custom, this celebrated traveller adds the reflection that “the habit of shedding blood, or simply of seeing it shed, corrupts all sentiments of humanity.” (See Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte.) See, too, Thevenot (the younger), an earlier French traveller, who describes a Banian hospital, in which he saw a number of sick Camels, Horses, and Oxen, and many invalids of the feathered race. Many of the lower Animals, he informs us, were maintained there for life, those who recovered being sold to Hindus exclusively.
[317] This feeling occasionally appears in his poems, as, for instance, when describing a “banquet” and its flesh-eating guests, he wonders how “Such bodies could have souls, or souls such bodies.”
[318] Note on this point the words of the late W. R. Greg, to the effect that “the amount of human life sustained on a given area may be almost indefinitely increased by the substitution of vegetable for animal food;” and his further statement—“A given acreage of wheat will feed at least ten times as many men as the same acreage employed in growing ‘mutton.’ It is usually calculated that the consumption of wheat by an adult is about one quarter per annum, and we know that good land produces four quarters. But let us assume that a man living on grain would require two quarters a year; still one acre would support two men. But, a man living on [flesh] meat would need 3lbs. a day, and it is considered a liberal calculation if an acre spent in grazing sheep and cattle will yield in ‘beef’ and ‘mutton’ more than 50lb. on an average—the best farmer in Norfolk having averaged 90lb., but a great majority of farms in Great Britain only reach 20lb. On these data it would require 22 acres of pasture land to sustain one adult person living on [flesh] meat. It is obvious that in view of the adoption of a vegetable diet lies the indication of a vast increase in the population sustainable on a given area.”—Social and Political Problems (Trübner).
[319] “Of the Cruelty connected with he Culinary Arts” in Philozoa; or, Moral Reflections on the Actual Condition of the Animal Kingdom, and on the Means of Improving the Same; with numerous Anecdotes and Illustrative Notes, addressed to Lewis Gompertz, Esq., President of the Animals’ Friend Society: By T. Forster, M.B., F.R.A.S., F.L.S., &c. Brussels, 1839. The writer well insists that, however remote may be a universal Reformation, every individual person, pretending to any culture or refinement of mind, is morally bound to abstain from sanctioning, by his dietetic habits, the revolting atrocities “connected with the culinary arts, of which Mr. Young, in his Book on Cruelty, has given a long catalogue.”