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

by J. Howard Moore

The apology of the criminals has always been the same as it is today—that the crucified creatures were of a different order of being—that a chasm yawned between the persecutors and the persecuted—that there was not a solidarity. The Gaul has no rights because he was a “barbarian.” The fact that he has a nervous system and a love of life had nothing to do with it. The black man had no rights that were inconvenient to respect because he had no soul and because his subordination was God-ordained. And the honest ox and the faithful dog have no rights today, because they were made to be murdered.

I am a vegetarian because I believe in justice. There is injustice in the universe, because there are beings in it who monopolize its sweets and opportunities. They want their own pleasures and also the pleasures of others. They shuffle upon others their bitters, and at the same time rob them of their sweets. Others live, not as ends, but as means and conveniences. I do not eat my fellow creatures, for the same reason I do not enslave my brother and treat my sister as an appendage and otherwise monopolize the sweets and opportunities of the planet. There are on this ball billions of beings. They are my fellow creatures. So far as I can make out they have approximately the same right to existence and to the enjoyment of existence as I have. I do not want their pleasures and I do not want them to drink my sorrows. I want simply my own and I am perfectly content to rob no one. In the words of another, “I never want happiness that gives another pain. I wish not happiness from others—only happiness out of the bosom of the great all which comes like the red flowers of the oleander.”

I am a vegetarian because it is logical and natural to be so. The vegetable world contains all the elements necessary to human sustenance, and in a much more prime condition than they are found in the diseased tissues of our mistreated servants. The belief that we can not have peach in our dimples and diamonds in our brains without dead bodies in our digestion is a belief having no foundation except ignorance. Vegetal fibrin is identical with animal fibrin, and vegetal albumen is identical with animal albumen. Even in albuminoids, in the supply of which meat is supposed to be rather exclusive, there are vegetables, nuts and grains that far exceed chops and steaks. Fish, for instance, contains about 13 per cent. of albuminoids, pork on average 16 per cent., and beef 17½ per cent.; while nuts furnish from 8 to 25 per cent., grains 7 to 15 per cent., eggs 14 per cent., cheese 29 per cent., peas 22 per cent., lentils 25 per cent., and beans from 22 to 35 per cent. The vegetable world, in fact, is the natural storehouse and the only original storehouse from which animals may derive energy. No animal can produce protoplasm, which is the basis of all life and energy. This is a function of the plant, and of the plant only. All an animal can do is to take it after it is produced and burn it up. Animals are simply locomotives consuming the energy which plants slowly accumulate from the sun. It is a graceful and perfect process—plants storing up energy from the soil and sun, the inorganic, and the animal using this energy and completing the circle by sending the elements back again to the inorganic. And it is a “barbarism” in nature for animals to violate this beautiful arrangement by turning around and swallowing each other.

To one accustomed to obtain his supply of protoplasm chiefly from the bones of other animals instead of from the kingdom of the plant, the assertion that it is possible not only to sustain but to enhance existence on a fleshless diet seems very strange. It is not strange that such an assertion should seem strange. Anything is strange to the uninitiated. And the amount of ignorance on this subject is well-nigh pitiable. The delusion that flesh is the most genuine source of human energy has become so fixed that it actually disturbs the respiration of nineteen out of twenty to be told that flesh compared with many foods is a dilute form of nutrition, and that more than half the inhabitants of the earth today are practical and prosperous vegetarians. There is no reason known to science or experience why human beings may not keep up as profitable and as interesting an existence without flesh as with it. In fact, after an experience of four years and a rather careful contemplation of the matter, I assert that physiological integrity may be more accurately sustained by a judicious diet of fruits, grains, vegetables, and nuts than by a diet in which carrion is a distinguished constituent. Man is not naturally a carnivorous animal. He has evolved from the frugivorous anthropoids, and has a long biological ancestry of vegetarians. His mouth, digestive organs, skin structure, and modes of life are all unadapted to a carnivorous life. Man has probably adopted predatory habits almost within historic times. Not only the student and the thinker but the manual laborer as well is benefited by a fleshless regimen. A breakfast of oatmeal and cream, a couple of eggs on toast, whole wheat muffins and butter, and a nice rich apple or banana is much more civilized, nutritious and economical than a breakfast in which bloody beef plays chief role. The most successful burden bearers of the world today are vegetarians. The Turkish longshoremen, perhaps the most powerful bipeds on the planet (except the gorilla), are lifelong vegetarians. They will pick up a burden of six or eight hundred pounds and walk away with it with no more effort than is made by a meat-eating Englishman in carrying two hundred. De Lesseps said that the Suez Canal, the greatest engineering achievement ever accomplished on the earth, never could have been finished, on account of the heat and the slavish character of the labor, by meat-eating Europeans. It had to be done by the barley-feeding Bedouins and Armenians. De Lesseps became a vegetarian and remained one to his death, from his experiences in the building of the Suez Canal. The peasantry of Russia, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and even Norway and Sweden away from the coast, are largely vegetarians. So, also, are millions in the Orient.

From the standpoint of economy alone vegetarianism ought to appeal powerfully to everyone possessed of undoubted sanity. If men would take the beautiful fruits of the soil, fresh from nature’s hand, instead of sitting down and devouring in the form of the accumulated residuum of ruminants an acre at a meal, the problem of the increasing density of mundane population would not be such a grave one.

I am a vegetarian, therefore, because cannibalism is unnecessary. I can live just as well and be just as happy without drinking the blood of my fellows, and why should I slay them? Why should I not live and let live—especially when I can do it just as well as not? It is not necessary that ten thousand creatures should give up their lives in order that I may keep mine, and if I make any pretensions to morality why should I require them to do it? If you say such a thing is necessary in your case, I say to you it is not—and further, that if it were, it would be your duty as an ethical being to call on your undertaker. There is no sense in carnivora talking about ethics and justice and mercy, for their very existence is a travesty on such things. It makes me indignant and sad when I hear men deplore sin and prate about justice and love and mercy, when the very energy they expend in preaching justice and mercy is obtained from the skeletons and sensibilities of their fellows. It is a spectacle that ought to make the imps of netherdom tremble for their laurels—man, the remorseless glutton, going about with a tongue and a knife, with his tongue preaching peace, mercy, and love, and with his knife making the very earth sodden with blood.

It may seem irreverent, but I say it, that if Christians can do these crimes and yet so act as to earn celestial ecstasies, hell will be uninhabited. I would like to retain respect for the religion of my boyhood, but when I see that religion look with equanimity and even levity upon a hemorrhage wide as the continents and horrible even to heathens, not only wink at it but actually perpetuate it, and even scaffold those few emancipated souls who are trying to curtail it—I almost despair of it.

Vegetarianism appeals not to the selfish but to the noble. It is for beings who love justice, liberty, reciprocity. It teaches the Golden Rule in its only sensible sense. It recognizes the moral progress of the past and points to those still higher highlands toward which the ages have ever heaved. It teaches to do as you would be done by. “To whom?” Not to the black man and the white woman alone, but to the sorrel horse and the gray squirrel as well. Yes, do as you would be done by—not to creatures of your own anatomy or your own guild only, but to all creatures. In a world like this, with its tangles and irrationalities, it is impossible to act in every particular at all times and to all creatures ideally. This is not an ideal world, and if we are to judge of the universe by the clod we root and ride on, the whole thing is not a flattering affair. Our relations to our fellow men are not ideal, and from the nature of things they never can be. But we think we can do amply when we do the best we can. The difference between him who attempts honestly and faithfully to do just the best he can and him who knows little and cares less is as great as the difference between January and June.

Enjoy and let others enjoy. Live and let live. Do more. Live and help live. Do to beings below you as you would be done by beings above you. Pity the grub and the ladybug, and have mercy on the mole. Poor, defenceless, undeveloped, untaught creatures. They are our fellow mortals. They are enmeshed in the same mighty processes as we. They came from the same source and are destined to the same end. They lived, moved and breathed on primeval land fragments when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the seas. They are our ancestors. They are the forms of being that have made you and me possible. Let us be brothers and sisters to them, not ruffians; pity them and help them and pray for their untaught natures. Let us be consistent, for we have but one life to live. We are striving for the amelioration of this suffering world. Let us be economical. Let us not with one hand pour oil upon its agonies and with the other inflict gashes. Let us vow allegiance to the principles of universal courtesy and love, whether to the lone worm wandering in the twilight of consciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and forest, the heifer of the meadows, the simple savage on the banks of the gladed river, the political slaves whom men call wives, or the economic exiles of industry. The same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is today melting the white woman’s chains will tomorrow emancipate the workingman and the heifer, and as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit of leaven shall banish Selfishness from the earth and convert the planet finally to one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of Peace, Justice and Solidarity.