[316] Compare the Voyages of Volney, one of the most philosophical of the thinkers of the eighteenth century, who himself for some time seems to have lived on the non-flesh diet. Attributing the ferocious character of the American savage, “hunter and butcher, who, in every animal sees but an object of prey, and who is become an animal of the species of wolves and of tigers,” to such custom, this celebrated traveller adds the reflection that “the habit of shedding blood, or simply of seeing it shed, corrupts all sentiments of humanity.” (See Voyage en Syrie et en Egypte.) See, too, Thevenot (the younger), an earlier French traveller, who describes a Banian hospital, in which he saw a number of sick Camels, Horses, and Oxen, and many invalids of the feathered race. Many of the lower Animals, he informs us, were maintained there for life, those who recovered being sold to Hindus exclusively.

[317] This feeling occasionally appears in his poems, as, for instance, when describing a “banquet” and its flesh-eating guests, he wonders how “Such bodies could have souls, or souls such bodies.”

[318] Note on this point the words of the late W. R. Greg, to the effect that “the amount of human life sustained on a given area may be almost indefinitely increased by the substitution of vegetable for animal food;” and his further statement—“A given acreage of wheat will feed at least ten times as many men as the same acreage employed in growing ‘mutton.’ It is usually calculated that the consumption of wheat by an adult is about one quarter per annum, and we know that good land produces four quarters. But let us assume that a man living on grain would require two quarters a year; still one acre would support two men. But, a man living on [flesh] meat would need 3lbs. a day, and it is considered a liberal calculation if an acre spent in grazing sheep and cattle will yield in ‘beef’ and ‘mutton’ more than 50lb. on an average—the best farmer in Norfolk having averaged 90lb., but a great majority of farms in Great Britain only reach 20lb. On these data it would require 22 acres of pasture land to sustain one adult person living on [flesh] meat. It is obvious that in view of the adoption of a vegetable diet lies the indication of a vast increase in the population sustainable on a given area.”—Social and Political Problems (Trübner).

[319] “Of the Cruelty connected with he Culinary Arts” in Philozoa; or, Moral Reflections on the Actual Condition of the Animal Kingdom, and on the Means of Improving the Same; with numerous Anecdotes and Illustrative Notes, addressed to Lewis Gompertz, Esq., President of the Animals’ Friend Society: By T. Forster, M.B., F.R.A.S., F.L.S., &c. Brussels, 1839. The writer well insists that, however remote may be a universal Reformation, every individual person, pretending to any culture or refinement of mind, is morally bound to abstain from sanctioning, by his dietetic habits, the revolting atrocities “connected with the culinary arts, of which Mr. Young, in his Book on Cruelty, has given a long catalogue.”