The taste of young children is often cited by vegetarians to demonstrate the liking of an unsophisticated palate, but the primitive instinct is not wholly atrophied in man. Before man became a tool-using animal, he must have depended for direction upon what is commonly termed instinct in the selection of a diet most suitable to his nature. No one can doubt, judging by the way undomesticated animals seek their food with unerring certainty as to its suitability, but that instinct is a trustworthy guide. Granting that man could, in a state of absolute savagery, and before he had discovered the use of fire or of tools, depend upon instinct alone, and in so doing live healthily, cannot what yet remains of instinct be of some value among civilized beings? Is not man, even now, in spite of his abused and corrupted senses, when he sees luscious fruits hanging within his reach, tempted to pluck them, and does he not eat them with relish? But when he sees the grazing ox, or the wallowing hog, do similar gustatory desires affect him? Or when he sees these animals lying dead, or when skinned and cut up in small pieces, does this same natural instinct stimulate him to steal and eat this food as it stimulates a boy to steal apples and nuts from an orchard and eat them surreptitiously beneath the hedge or behind the haystack?
Very different is it with true carnivora. The gorge of a cat, for instance, will rise at the smell of a mouse, or a piece of raw flesh, but not at the aroma of fruit. If a man could take delight in pouncing upon a bird, tear its still living body apart with his teeth, sucking the warm blood, one might infer that Nature had provided him with carnivorous instinct, but the very thought of doing such a thing makes him shudder. On the other hand, a bunch of luscious grapes makes his 'mouth water,' and even in the absence of hunger he will eat fruit to gratify taste. A table spread with fruits and nuts and decorated with flowers is artistic; the same table laden with decaying flesh and blood, and maybe entrails, is not only inartistic—it is disgusting.
Those who believe in an all-wise Creator can hardly suppose He would have so made our body as to make it necessary daily to perform acts of violence that are an outrage to our sympathies, repulsive to our finer feelings, and brutalising and degrading in every detail. To possess fine feelings without the means to satisfy them is as bad as to possess hunger without a stomach. If it be necessary and a part of the Divine Wisdom that we should degrade ourselves to the level of beasts of prey, then the humanitarian sentiment and the æsthetic instinct are wrong and should be displaced by callousness, and the endeavour to cultivate a feeling of enjoyment in that which to all the organs of sense in a person of intelligence and religious feeling is ugly and repulsive. But no normally-minded person can think that this is so. It would be contrary to all the ethical and æsthetic teachings of every religion, and antagonistic to the feelings of all who have evolved to the possession of a conscience and the power to distinguish the beautiful from the base.
When one accustomed to an omnivorous diet adopts a vegetarian régime, a steadily growing refinement in taste and smell is experienced. Delicate and subtle flavours, hitherto unnoticed, especially if the habit of thorough mastication be practised, soon convince the neophyte that a vegetarian is by no means denied the pleasure of gustatory enjoyment. Further, not only are these senses better attuned and refined, but the mind also undergoes a similar exaltation. Thoreau, the transcendentalist, wrote: 'I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.'
V
ECONOMICAL CONSIDERATIONS
There is no doubt that the yield of land when utilized for pasturage is less than what it will produce in the hands of the agriculturist. In a thickly populated country, such as England, dependent under present conditions on foreign countries for a large proportion of her food supply, it is foolish, considering only the political aspects, to employ the land for raising unnecessary flesh-food, and so be compelled to apply to foreign markets for the first necessaries of life, when there is, without doubt, sufficient agricultural land in England to support the entire population on a vegetable regimen. As just said, a much larger population can be supported on a given acreage cultivated with vegetable produce than would be possible were the same land used for grazing cattle. Lieut. Powell quotes Prof. Francis Newman of University College, London, as declaring that—
100 acres devoted to sheep-raising will support 42 men: proportion 1.