[230] That the victims of the Slaughter-House have, in fact, a full presentiment of the fate in store for them, must be sufficiently evident to every one who has witnessed a number of oxen or sheep driven towards the scene of slaughter—the frantic struggles to escape and rush past the horrible locality, the exertions necessary on the part of the drovers or slaughtermen to force them to enter as well as the frequent breaking away of the maddened victim—maddened alike by the blows and clamours of its executioners and the presentiment of its destiny—who frantically rushes through the public streets and scatters the terrified human passengers—all this abundantly proves the transparent falsity of the assertion of the unconsciousness or indifference of the victims of the shambles. See a terribly graphic description of a scene of this kind in Household Words, No. 14, quoted in Dietetic Reformer (1852), in Thalysie, and in the Dietetic Reformer, passim. Also in Animal World, &c., &c.
[231] Thalysie: ou La Nouvelle Existence: Par J. A. Gleïzès. Paris, 1840, in 3 vols., 8vo. See also preface to the German version of R. Springer, Berlin, 1872. Our English readers will be glad to learn that a translation by the English Vegetarian Society is now being contemplated.
[232] Poeta, in its original Greek meaning, marks out a creator of new, and, therefore, (it is presumable) true ideas.
[233] Compare the fate of Gibbon, who, at the same age, found himself an outcast from the University for a very opposite offence—for having embraced the dogmas of Catholicism. (See Memoirs of my Life and Writings, by Edw. Gibbon.) The future historian of The Decline and Fall, it may be added, speedily returned to Protestantism, though not to that of his preceptors.
[234] Shelley. By J. A. Symonds. Macmillan, 1887.
[235] Hogg’s Life of Shelley. Moxon (1858).
[236] Shelley. By J. A. Symonds.
[237] Cuvier’s Leçons d’Anatomie Comp., Tom. III., pages 169, 373, 443, 465, 480. Rees’ Cyclop., Art Man.
[238] Inasmuch as at this moment there are in this country more than two thousand persons of all classes, very many for thirty or forty years strict abstinents from flesh-meat, enrolled members of the Vegetarian Society (not to speak of a probably large number of isolated individual abstinents scattered throughout these islands, who, for whatever reason, have not attached themselves to the Society), and that there have long been Anti-flesh eating Societies in America and in Germany, the à fortiori argument in the present instance will be allowed to be of double weight.
[239] “See Mr. Newton’s Book [Return, to Nature. Cadell, 1811.] His children are the most beautiful and healthy creatures it is possible to conceive. The girls are perfect models for a sculptor; their dispositions also are the most gentle and conciliating. The judicious treatment they receive may be a correlative cause of this. In the first five years of their life, of 18,000 children that are born, 7,500 die of various diseases—and how many more that survive are rendered miserable by maladies not immediately mortal! The quality and quantity of a mother’s milk are materially injured by the use of dead flesh. On an island, near Iceland, where no vegetables are to be got, the children invariably die of tetanus before they are three weeks old, and the population is supplied from the mainland.—Sir G. Mackenzie’s History of Iceland—note by Shelley.”
[240] Revolt of Islam, v. 51, 55, 56.
[241] Lately given to the world by Mr. Forman who has carefully collated and printed from Shelley’s MSS.
[242] English Cyclopædia.
[243] Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. Moxon.
[244] Shelley. By J. A. Symonds.
[245] See preface to The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs. Shelley. New edition. London, 1869. The increasing reputation of Shelley is proved, at the present time, by the increasing number of editions of his writings, and by the increasing number of thoughtful criticisms and biographies of the poet, by some of the most cultured minds of the day. Since the time, indeed, when a popular writer but sometimes rash critic, with condemnable want of discernment and still more condemnable prejudice, so egregiously misrepresented to his readers the character as well of the poet as of his poems—which latter, nevertheless, he was constrained to admit to be the most “melodious” of all English poetry excepting Shakespere, and (their “utopian” inspiration apart) the most “perfect”—(Thoughts on Shelley and Byron, by Rev. C. Kingsley, “Fraser,” 1853,) the pre-eminence of the poet, both morally and æsthetically, has been sufficiently established.
[246] In another place he indulges his ironical wit at the expense of the beef-eaters, in representing a certain Cretan personage in Greek story to have
[247] See Life and Letters. Murray.
[248] Memoirs of the Public and Private Life of Sir R. Phillips. London, 1808.
[249] They had been published by him several years earlier in the Medical Journal for July 27 1811.
[250] Golden Rules of Social Philosophy: being a System of Ethics. 1826.
[251] A Dictionary of the Arts of Life and Civilisation. 1833. London: Sherwood & Co. It will be seen that the origin of his revolt from orthodox dietetics, given by himself, differs from that narrated in the Life from which we have quoted above. It is possible that both incidents may have equally affected him at the moment, but that the spectacle of the London slaughter-house remained most vividly impressed upon his mind.
[252] Million of Facts, p. 176. For the substance of the greater part of this biography, our acknowledgments are due to the researches of Mr. W. E. A. Axon, F.R.S.L., F.S.S.
[253] La Chute d’un Ange. Huitième Vision.
[254] Les Confidences, par Alphonse de Lamartine, Paris, 1849–51, quoted in Dietetic Reformer, August, 1881. It is in this book, too, that he commemorates some of the many atrocities perpetrated by schoolboys with impunity, or even with the connivance of their masters, for their amusement, upon the helpless victims of their unchecked cruelty of disposition.
[255] The question of kreophagy and anti-kreophagy had already been mooted, it appears, in the Institut, at the period of the great Revolution of 1789, as a legitimate consequence of the apparent general awakening of the human conscience, when slavery also was first publicly denounced. What was the result of the first raising of this question in the French Chamber of Savans does not appear, but, as Gleïzès remarks, we may easily divine it. One interesting fact was published by the discussion in the Deputies’ Chamber—viz., that in the year 1817, in Paris, the consumption of flesh was less than that of the year 1780 by 40,000,000lb., in proportion to the population (see Gleïzès, Thalysie, Quatrième Discours), a fact which can only mean that the rich, who support the butchers, had been forced by reduced means to live less carnivorously.
[256] In the same strain an eminent savan, Sir D. Brewster, has given expression to his feeling of aversion from the slaughter-house—a righteous feeling which (strange perversion of judgment) is so constantly repressed in spite of all the most forcible promptings of conscience and reason! These are his words: “But whatever races there be in other spheres, we feel sure that there must be one amongst whom there are no man-eaters—no heroes with red hands—no sovereigns with bloody hearts—and no statesmen who, leaving the people untaught, educate them for the scaffold. In the Decalogue of that community will stand pre-eminent, in letters of burnished gold, the highest of all social obligations—‘Thou shalt not kill, neither for territory, for fame, for lucre, nor for food, nor for raiment, nor for pleasure.’ The lovely forms of life, and sensation, and instinct, so delicately fashioned by the Master-hand, shall no longer be destroyed and trodden under foot, but shall be the objects of increasing love and admiration, the study of the philosopher, the theme of the poet, and the companions and auxiliaries of Man.”—More Worlds than One.
[257] Bible de l’Humanité—Redemption de la Nature, VI.
[258] Cf. a recently published Essay, in the form of a letter to the present Premier, Mr. Gladstone, entitled The Woman and the Age. The author, one of the most refined thinkers of our times, has at once admirably exposed the utter sham as well as cruelty of a vivisecting science, and demonstrated the necessary and natural results to the human race from its shameless outrage upon, and cynical contempt for, the first principles of morality.
[259] The Bird, by Jules Michelet. English Translation. Nelson, London, 1870. See, too, his eloquent exposure of the scientific or popular error which, denying conscious reason and intelligence, in order to explain the mental constitution of the non-human races (as well that of the higher mammals as of the inferior species), has invented the vague and mystifying term “instinct.”
[260] La Femme, vi. Onzième Edition. Paris, 1879.
[261] This memorable building has been succeeded by the present well-known one in Cross Lane, where the Rev. James Clark, one of the most esteemed, as well as one of the oldest, members of the Vegetarian Society is the able and eloquent officiating minister.
[262] These biographical facts we have transferred to our pages from an interesting notice by Mr W. E. A. Axon, F.R.S.L.
[263] Memoir of the Rev. William. Metcalfe, M.D. By his son, Rev. Joseph Metcalfe, Philadelphia, 1865.
[264] See Memoir of the Rev. William Metcalfe. By his son, the Rev J. Metcalfe. Philadelphia; J. Capen. 1866.
[265] See Memoir in Sylvester Graham’s Lectures on the Science of Human Life. Condensed by T. Baker, Esq., of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-Law. Manchester: Heywood; London: Pitman.
[266] The New American Cyclopædia. Appleton, New York, 1861. It deserves remark in this place that, in no English cyclopædia or biographical dictionary, as far as our knowledge extends, is any sort of notice given of this great sanitary reformer. The same disappointment is experienced in regard to not a few other great names, whether in hygienic or humanitarian literature. The absence of the names of such true benefactors of the world in these books of reference is all the more surprising in view of the presence of an infinite number of persons—of all kinds—who have contributed little to the stock of true knowledge or to the welfare of the world.
[267] The Greek story of the savage horses of the Thracian king who were fed upon human flesh, therefore, may very well be true.
[268] Graham here quotes various authorities—Linné, Cuvier, Lawrence Bell, and others.
[269] Professor Lawrence instances particularly “the Laplanders, Samoides, Ostiacs, Tungooses, Burats, and Bamtschatdales, in Northern Europe and Asia, as well as the Esquimaux in the northern, and the natives of Tierra del Fuego in the southern, extremity of America, who, although they live almost entirely on flesh, and that often raw, are the smallest, weakest, and least brave people of the globe.”—Lectures on Physiology. Of all races the North American native tribes, who subsist almost entirely by the chase, are notoriously one of the most ferocious and cruel. That the omnivorous classes in “civilised” Europe—in this country particularly—have attained their present position, political or intellectual, in spite of their kreophagistic habits is attributable to a complex set of conditions and circumstances (an extensive inquiry, upon which it is impossible to enter here) which have, in some measure, mitigated the evil results of a barbarous diet, will be sufficiently clear to every unprejudiced inquirer. If flesh-eating be the cause, or one of the principal causes, of the present dominance of the European, and especially English-speaking peoples, it may justly be asked—how is to be explained, e.g., the dominance of the Saracenic power (in S. Europe) during seven centuries—a dominance in arms as well as in arts and sciences—when the semi-barbarous Christian nations (at least as regards the ruling classes) were wholly kreophagistic.
[270] For one of the ablest and most exhaustive scientific arguments on the same side ever published we refer our readers to The Perfect Way in Diet, by Mrs. Algernon Kingsford, M.D. (Kegan Paul, London, 1881). Originally written and delivered as a Thesis for le Doctorat en Médicine at the Paris University, under the title of L’Alimentation Végétale Chez L’Homme (1880), it was almost immediately translated into German by Dr. A. Aderholdt under the same title of Die Pfanzennahrung bei dem Menschen. It is, we believe, about to be translated into Russian. The humane and moral argument of this eloquent work is equally admirable and equally persuasive with the scientific proofs.
[272] See Pflanzenkost; oder die Grundlage einer Neuen Weltanschauung, Von Gustav Struve, Stuttgart, 1869. For the substance of the brief sketch of the life of Struve we are indebted to the courtesy of Herr Emil Weilshaeuser, the recently-elected President of the Vegetarian Society of Germany (Jan., 1882), himself the author of some valuable words on Reformed Dietetics.
[273] See Sakuntalà, or the Fatal Ring, of the Hindu Shakspere Kalidâsa, the most interesting production of the Hindu Poetry. It has been translated into almost every European language.
[274] Mandaras’ Wanderungen. Zweite Ausgabe. Mannheim. Friedrich Götz. 1845. For a copy of this now scarce book we are indebted to the courtesy of Herr A. von Seefeld, of Hanover.
[275] Pflanzenkost, die Grundlage einer neuen Weltanschauung. Stuttgart, 1869. Cf. Liebig’s Chemische Briefe (“Letters on Chemistry.”)
[276] Das Seelenleben; oder die Naturgeschichte des Menschen. Von Gustav Struve. Berlin: Theobald Grieben. 1869.
[278] Quoted in Die Naturgemässe Diät: die Diät der Zukunft, von Theodor Hahn, Cöthen, 1859. For the substance of biographical notice prefixed to this article we are again indebted to the kindness of Herr Emil Weilshäuser, of Oppeln.
[279] Das Menschendasein in seinen Weltewigen Zügen und Zeichen. Von Bogumil Goltz. Frankfurt.
[280] Compare the remarks of Jean Paul Richter (1763–1825), in his treatise on Education, Levana, in which he, too, in scarcely less emphatic language, protests against the general neglect of this department of morals. Among other references to the subject, the celebrated novelist thus writes: “Love is the second hemisphere of the moral heaven. Yet is the sacred being of love little established. Love is an inborn but differently distributed force and blood-heat of the heart (blutwärme des herzens). There are cold and warm-blooded souls, as there are animals. As for the child, so for the lower animal, love is, in fact, an essential impulse; and this central fire often, in the form of compassion, pierces its earth-crust, but not in every case.... The child (under proper education) learns to regard all animal life as sacred—in brief, they impart to him the feeling of a Hindu in place of the heart of a Cartesian philosopher. There is here a question of something more even than compassion for other animals; but this also is in question. Why is it that it has so long been observed that the cruelty of the child to the lower animals presages cruelty to men, just as the Old-Testament sacrifice of animals preshadowed that of the sacrifice of a man? It is for himself only the undeveloped man can experience pains and sufferings, which speak to him with the native tones of his own experience. Consequently, the inarticulate cry of the tortured animal comes to him just as some strange, amusing sound of the air; and yet he sees there life, conscious movement, both which distinguish them from the inanimate substances. Thus he sins against his own life, whilst he sunders it from the rest, as though it were a piece of machinery. Let life be to him [the child] sacred (heilig), even that which may be destitute of reason; and, in fact, does the child know any other? Or, because the heart beats under bristles, feathers, or wings, is it, therefore, to be of no account?”
[281] See a pamphlet upon this subject by Dr. V. Gützlaff—Schopenhauer ueber die Thiere und den Thierschutz: Ein Beitrag zur ethischen Seite der Vivisectionsfrage. Berlin, 1879.
[282] Le Fondement de La Morale, par Arthur Schopenhauer, traduit de l’Allemand par A. Burdeau. Paris, Baillière et Cie, 1879.
[283] Quoted in Die Naturgemässe Diät, die Diät der Zukunft, von Theodor Hahn, 1859. We may note here that Moleschott, the eminent Dutch physiologist, and a younger contemporary of Liebig, alike with the distinguished German Chemist and with the French zoologist, Buffon, is chargeable with a strange inconsistency in choosing his place among the apologists of kreophagy, in spite of his conviction that “the legumes are superior to flesh-meat in abundance of solid constituents which they contain; and, while the amount of albuminous substances may surpass that in flesh-meat by one-half, the constituents of fat and the salts are also present in a greater abundance.” (See Die Naturgemässe Diät, von Theodor Hahn, 1859). But, in fact, it is only too obvious why at present the large majority of Scientists, while often fully admitting the virtues, or even the superiority of the purer diet, yet after all enrol themselves on the orthodox side. Either they are altogether indifferent to humane teaching, or they want the courage of their convictions to proclaim the Truth.
[284] Among English philosophic writers, the arguments and warnings (published in the Dietetic Reformer during the past fifteen years) of the present head of the Society for the promotion of Dietary Reform in this country, Professor Newman, in regard to National Economy and to the enormous evils, present and prospective, arising from the prevalent insensibility to this aspect of National Reform are at once the most forcible and the most earnest. It would be well if our public men, and all who are in place and power, would give the most earnest heed to them. But this, unhappily, under the present prevailing political and social conditions, experience teaches to be almost a vain expectation.
[285] Μήλοισι Grævius, the famous German Scholar of the 17th century, maintains to mean here Fruits, not “Flocks,” according to the vulgar interpretation, and the translation of Grævius, it will be allowed, is at least more consistent with the context than is the latter. It must be added that the whole verse bracketed is of doubtful genuineness.
[286] This remarkable passage, it is highly interesting to note, is the earliest indication of the idea of “guardian angels,” which afterwards was developed in the Platonic philosophy; and which, considerably modified by Jewish belief, derived from the Persian theology, finally took form in the Christian creed. Compare the beautiful idea of guardian angels, or spirits in the Prologue of the Shipwreck of Plautus.
[287] See Poetæ Minores Græci ... Aliisque Accessionibus Aucta. Edited by Thomas Gaisford. Vol. III. Lipsiæ, 1823.
[289] The Light of Asia: or, The Great Renunciation (Mahâbhinishkramana). Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India, and Founder of Buddhism (as told in verse by an Indian Buddhist). By Edwin Arnold. London: Trübner.—In the Hindu Epic, the Mahâbhârata, the same great principle is apparent, though less conspicuously:—
[290] Compare the beautiful verses of Lucretius—who, almost alone amongst the poets, has indignantly denounced the vile and horrible practice of sacrifice—picturing the inconsolable grief the Mother Cow bereft of her young, who has been ravished from her for the sacrificial altar:—
See also the memorable verses in which the rationalist poet stigmatises the vicarious sacrifice of Iphigeneia.—Tantum Religio potuit suadere Malorum (L).
[291] See, also, Fasti, already quoted above.
[292] Florilegium of Stobæus—(17–43 and 18–38), quoted by Professor Mayor in Dietetic Reformer, July, 1881. In the erudite and exhaustive edition of Juvenal, by Professor Mayor (Macmillan, Cambridge), will be found a large number of quotations from Greek and Latin writers, and a great deal of interesting matter upon frugal living.
[293] “Hygiasticon: On the Right Course of Preserving Life and Health unto Extreme Old Age; together with Soundness and Integrity of the Senses, Judgment, and Memory. Written in Latin by Leonard Lessius, and now done into English. The second edition. Printed by the printers to the Universitie of Cambridge, 1634.” Lessio, like his master Cornaro, Haller, and many other advocates of a reformed diet, was influenced not at all by humanitarian, but by health reasons only.
[294] Cf. Plutarch—Essay on Flesh-Eating.
[295] Some Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Thomas Tryon, late of London, Merchant. Written by Himself. London, 1705.
[296] Os homini sublime dedit, cœlumque tueri.—Ovid, Met. I.
[297] Compare Seneca and Chrysostom, above.
[298] If Tryon could point to diseases among the victims of the shambles in the 17th century, what use might he not make of the epidemics or endemics of the present day?
[299] The Way to Health, Long Life, and Happiness: or a Discourse of Temperance, and the Particular Nature of all things Requisite for the Life of Man.... The Like never before Published. Communicated to the World, for the General Good, by Philotheos Physiologus [Tryon’s nom de plume.] London, 1683. It is (in its best parts) the worthy precursor of The Herald of Health, and of the valuable hygienic philosophy of its able editor—Dr. T. L. Nichols.
[300] See Biog. Universelle, Art. Philippe Hecquet
[301] Traité des Dispenses, &c. Par Philippe Hecquet, M.D., Paris. Ed. 1709.
[303] And, Pope might have added, a more diabolical torture still—calves bled to death by a slow and lingering process—hung up (as they often are) head downwards. Although not universal as it was some ten years ago, this, among other Christian practices, yet flourishes in many parts of the country, unchecked by legal intervention.
[304] See Article, Plutarch, above.
[305] So far, at least, as the natural and necessary wants of each species are concerned.—That “Nature” is regardless of suffering, is but too apparent in all parts of our globe. It is the opprobrium and shame of the human species that, placed at the head of the various races of beings, it has hitherto been the Tyrant, and not the Pacificator.
[306] The Four Stages of Cruelty, in which, beginning with the torture of other animals, the legitimate sequence is fulfilled in the murder of the torturer’s mistress or wife.
[307] Which is the accomplice really guilty? The ignorant, untaught, wretch who has to gain his living some way or other, or those who have been entrusted with, or who have assumed, the control of the public conscience—the statesman, the clergy, and the schoolmaster? Undoubtedly it is upon these that almost all the guilt lies, and always will lie.
[308] Bull-baiting, in this country, has been for some years illegal; but that moralists, and other writers of the present day, while boasting the abolition of that popular pastime, are silent, upon the equally barbarous, if more fashionable sports of Deer-hunting, &c., is one of those inconsistencies in logic which are as unaccountable as they are common.
[309] “That is,” remarks Ritson, “in a state of Society influenced by Superstition, Pride, and a variety of prejudices equally unnatural and absurd.”
[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).