“They (the oxen and sheep) consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore the dearest wool. There noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea, much annoying, the public weal, leave no land for tillage—they enclose all into pasture, they throw down houses, they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep house; and, as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands, and parks, those good holy men turn dwelling-places and all glebe land into wilderness and desolation.... For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands would be requisite. And this is also the cause why victuals be now in many places dearer; yea, besides this, the price of wool is so risen that poor folks, which were wont to work it and make cloth thereof, be now able to buy none at all, and by this means very many be forced to forsake work and to give themselves to idleness. For after that so much land was enclosed for pasture, an infinite multitude of sheep died of the rot, such vengeance God took of their inordinate and insatiable covetousness, sending among the sheep that pestiferous murrain which much more justly should have fallen on the sheep-masters’ own heads; and though the number of sheep increase never so fast, yet the price falleth not one mite, because there be so few sellers,” &c.

These sagacious and just reflections upon the evil social consequences of carnivorousness may be fitly commended to the earnest attention of our public writers and speakers of to-day. The periodical cattle plagues and foot-and-mouth diseases, which, in theological language, are vaguely assigned to national sins, might be more ingenuously and truthfully attributed to the one sufficient cause—to the general indulgence of selfish instincts, which closes the ear to all the promptings at once of humanity and of reason, and is, in truth, a national sin of the most serious character.[108]

The “wisdom of our ancestors,” which has been so often invoked, both before and since the days of More, and which Bentham has so mercilessly exposed, apparently did not subdue the reason of the author of Utopia; yet, with no little amount of applause it has been made to serve as a very conclusive argument against dietetic reformation, as against many other changes:—

“‘These things,’ say they, ‘pleased our forefathers and ancestors—would to God we could be so wise as they were!’ And, as though they had wittily concluded the matter, and with this answer stopped every man’s mouth, they sit down again as who should say, ‘It were a very dangerous matter if a man in any point should be found wiser than his forefathers were.’ And yet be we content to suffer the best and wittiest [wisest] of their decrees to be unexecuted; but if in anything a better order might have been taken than by them was, there we take fast hold, finding therein many virtues.”[109]

XIII.
MONTAIGNE. 1533–1592.

THE modern Plutarch and the first of essayists deserves his place in this work, if not so much for express and explicit denunciation, totidem verbis, of the barbarism of the Slaughter-House, at least for a sort of argument which logically and necessarily arrives at the same conclusion. In truth, if he had not “seen and approved the better way” (even though, with too many others, he may not have had the courage of his convictions), he would be no true disciple of the great humanitarian. It is necessary to remember that the “perfect day” was not yet come; that a few rays only here and there enlightened the thick darkness of barbarism; that, in fine, not even yet, with the light of truth shining full upon us, have reason and conscience triumphed, as regards the mass of the community, either in this country or elsewhere.

Michel de Montaigne descended from an old and influential house in Périgord (modern Périgeaux, in the department of the Dordogne). His youth was carefully trained, and his early inclination to learning fostered under his father’s diligent superintendence. He became a member of the provincial parliament, and, by the universal suffrage of his fellow-citizens, was elected chief magistrate of Bordeaux, from the official routine of whose duties he soon retired to the more congenial atmosphere of study and philosophic reflection. In his château, at Montaigne, his studious tranquillity was violently interrupted by the savage contests then raging between the opposing factions of Catholics and Huguenots, from both of whom he received ill-treatment and loss. To add to his troubles, the plague, which appeared in Guienne in 1586, broke up his household and compelled him, with his family, to abandon his home. Together they wandered through the country, exposed to the various dangers of a civil war; and he afterwards for some time settled in Paris. He had also travelled in Italy. Montaigne returned to his home when the disturbances and atrocities had somewhat subsided, and there he died with the philosophic calmness with which he had lived.

The Essais—that book of “good faith,” “without study and artifice,” as its author justly calls it—appeared in the year 1580. It is a book unique in modern literature, and the only other production to which it may be compared is the Moralia of Plutarch. “It is not a book we are reading, but a conversation to which we are listening.” “It is,” as another French critic observes, “less a book than a journal divided into chapters, which follow one another without connexion, which bear each a title without much regard to the fulfilment of their promise.”

Montaigne treats of almost every phase of human thought and action; and upon every subject he has something original and worth saying. Living in a savagely sectarian and persecuting age, he kept himself aloof and independent of either of the two contending theological sections, and contents himself with the rôle of a sceptical spectator. It must be admitted that he is not always satisfactory in this character, since he sometimes seems to give forth an “uncertain sound.” Considering the age, however, his assertion of the proper authority of Reason deserves our respectful admiration, and is in pleasing contrast with the attitude of most of his contemporaries. A few, like his friend De Thou, or the Italian Giordano Bruno—the latter of whom, indeed, had more of the martyr-spirit than Montaigne—contributed to keep alight the torch of Truth and Reason. But we have only to recollect that it was the age par excellence of Diabolism in Catholic and Protestant theology alike, and of all the horrible superstitions and frightful tortures, both bodily and mental, of which the universal belief in the Devil’s actual reign on earth was the fruitful cause. About the very time of the appearance of the Essais, one of the most learned men of the period, the lawyer Jean Bodin published a work which he called the Démonomanie des Sorciers (the “Diabolic Inspiration of Witches”), in which he protested his unwavering faith in the most monstrous beliefs of the creed, and vehemently called upon the judges, ecclesiastical and civil, to punish the reputed criminals (accused of an impossible crime) with the severest tortures. We have only to recognise this fact alone (the most astounding of all the astounding facts and phases in the history of Superstition) to do full justice to the reason and courage of this small band of protesters.