Why I Am a Vegetarian / An Address Delivered Before the Chicago Vegetarian Society

by J. Howard Moore

— Plutarch.

Why I Am a Vegetarian.

I am not here to convert you to vegetarianism. I know too well the nature of mind to commit any such blunder. I am here to talk English and, if possible, give you glimpses. I can not hope in half a hundred minutes to rinse from your brains sand bars that have been ages in depositing. It is no holiday matter to emancipate one’s self from an old, inveterate slavery. It is a task so formidable that few do it without help. It requires a courage and an iconoclasm greater than most possess to make heroic initiatives. But after a reform is accomplished and its principles become matters of course, there are then few persons without the ability to look back and wonder why idiots are so much like men.

Men are somnambulistic. Stupefied by the long night of instinct out of which it arose, the human mind is only half awake. Washington was the father of a country, but he held human beings as slaves and paid his hired help in Virginia whisky. It took Americans one hundred years to find out that “all men” included Ethiopians. Men who risked their lives to achieve personal and political liberty for black men deliberately doom white women to a similar servitude. Rich men give millions to museums or universities, when they would know, if they had the talent to stop and think, that the thousands who make their wealth work like wretches from morning till night and suffocate in garrets and feed on garbage, in order that they may be munificent. Human beings preach as the cardinal of morality that they should act upon others as they would be pleased to have others act upon them, and then take the most sensitive and beautiful beings all palpitating with life, and chop them into fragments with a composure that would do honor to the managers of an inferno.

It has been said that when a proposition is presented to us for our acceptance or rejection we treat it as we would treat an article of furniture presented to us for our apartments. We try it. If it fits in character and complexion, we accept it, and it becomes a part of our paraphernalia. If it does not fit, we reject it. Every proposition that comes to our intelligence is thus accepted or dismissed, depending on the congeniality or uncongeniality of the subjective and the objective. It is impossible absolutely for mind, constituted as it is on the earth, to accept a proposition that is antagonistic to it. And when a proposition is presented to the mind, the only way in the world to win its acceptance is by coaxing and modifying the mind itself. I come to you tonight with a proposition. In a very feeble and fragmentary way I attempt to do what every polemic attempts to do—to dynamite your minds, to havoc their foundations and reconstruct them in harmony with the proposition I champion. But there are so many attitudes of opposition possible, so many objections that are thinkable, and so many things assumed by those who pitch themselves against it, that I cannot hope in one evening to accomplish more than a beginning. But if I can somehow succeed in dilating your pupils a little, and enable you to realize in some measure the infamy in which you and the rest of the occidental world are today engaged, I shall feel better than if I had spoken to stones.

I want to remind you and warn you that it makes no difference how just a proposition may be and how universally and unreservedly it may be ultimately accepted, its beginning is always a period of interrogation and war. When Garrison first announced the proposition denying the right to auction Ethiopians, the proposition was assailed by the most formidable volleys of objection. Those objections seem puerile today, but in the days in which this proposition found few heads in which to hide, they were axioms of ethical and political science. So when you take an attitude on this proposition remember there are future generations as well as this one, and be careful that you do not make the same spectacle of yourself that poor old Webster and other blind men made when they poured cold water down the spines of early Abolitionists.

I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and, hence supposed myself alone among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being, should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others. But the problem that for some time tormented me was whether it were possible to keep up a successful and at all interesting existence without ox-hips. I wondered whether the universe were so constructed that it were impossible for its most endowed children to live without the crudest and most recreant egoism. There is now no remnant of a doubt about the possibilities of a bloodless existence, nor even of its positive hygienic advantages. I had been considerable of a vulture, and for sometime after eliminating flesh from my menus I had desire for it. But gradually that desire faded, and there came in its stead a growing horror of flesh. The grinding of the tissues of my fellow beings seemed horribly akin to the chewing of the emotions of my friends. After a few weeks of fruits and vegetables there came over me a feeling of exultation and superiority and crispness that was truly novel. Today, I am thoroughly emancipated from the coils of kreophagy. I shall go down to my grave and out into the darkling hereafter with a bloodless digestion, if I am the only animal in the universe to do so. The flesh-tearing performances which I am compelled everywhere to behold seem to me to be the lurid deeds of maniacs rather than the time and premeditated acts of sane beings. And I can but pity, not only the creatures whose throats are severed and whose skeletons are stripped, but the blind and reckless cannibals who perpetrate these crimes. When the whole earth teems with such a bewildering variety of beautiful and bloodless fruits, it seems so strange and so sad and so frightful that man should continue the barbarous, blood-sucking practices of the world’s infancy.

Vegetarianism is the neglect by one being to suppress another for nutritive purposes. I believe in it. I believe I should neglect to suppress the interests and lives of non-human beings for identically the same reason I should neglect to suppress the interests and lives of human beings. The exploitation of birds and quadrupeds for human whim or convenience is an offense not different in kind from the offenses denounced in human statutes as robbery and murder. And the same logic which impels abstinence from one of these offenses impels everyone who has the power to be consistent to refrain from all of them.

There is, in fact, but one crime in the universe and all varieties of impropriety whatsoever are aspects or phases of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation—the suppression of the interests, lives, or welfares of some beings for the whim or convenience of others—the neglect to recognize the equal or the approximately equal rights of all to life, consideration and happiness—the crime of doing to others as you would that others would not do to you.

I look back over the ages of this world—not the ages of human history simply, for the history of the human species is but a little section, the remembered chapter, in the history of the evolutions which have been performed by mundane life. I look back to the beginning of life on this planet—back 50,000,000 of years ago, when the first protoplasmic specks sprawled in primeval seas. Life originated in the sea fifteen hundred thousand human generations ago. After ages of evolution it crept out upon the continents, subsequently entered the forests, climbed and clambered among the trees, became endowed with perpendicularity and hands, descended and walked upon the soil, invented agriculture, built cities and states—and here we are. Human civilization is but the van, the hither terminus, of an evolutional process which had its beginning away back in the protoplasm of primeval slime. The philosopher is the remote posterity of the meek and lowly monad.