An Address Delivered before the Chicago Vegetarian Society
PREFACE.
The human race is like a snake—it sheds. Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news. Shrines at which one generation adores become to the succeeding desolate and despised.
This little brochure has a mission. It is not a formidable one, but it is. It goes out with the hope that it may help, if ever so infinitesimally, in ridding the human of that terrific instinct of inconsideration toward the sub-human races. Solidarity is its plea, human and universal.
It would be inexcusable to suppose it to be exhaustive. It is not even defensive. It is a projectile, and projectiles do not apologize.
It intends to be followed.
J. Howard Moore
Chicago, May, 1895.
“What more advance can mortals make in sin?
Deal to the calf that lies beneath the knife.
Looks up and from the butcher begs her life.
Deaf to the harmless kid, who, ere he dies,
All efforts to procure thy pity tries.
And imitates in vain thy children’s cries.”
ANONYMOUS.
‘‘No flocks that range the valley free.
To slaughter I condemn;
Taught by the Power that pities me,
I learn to pity them.”
GOLDSMITH.
“It is a vulgar error to regard meat in any form as necessary to human life.”
SIR HENRY THOMPSON.
“The anthropoids and all the quadrumana derive their alimentation from fruits, grains, and other succulent vegetal substances, and the strict analogy between the structure of these animals and that of man clearly demonstrates his frugivorous nature.”
OWEN.
“Does it not shame you to mingle blood and murder with nature’s beneficent fruits? Other carnivora, you call savage and ferocious lions, tigers and serpents—while yourselves come behind them in no species of barbarity. And yet for them murder is the only means of sustenance, whereas to you it is a superfluous luxury and crime.”
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” includes 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 timed and premeditated acts of sane beings. And I can but pity, not only the creatures whose throats are severed arid 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 that 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 hack 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.
Now, this whole enterprise, this entire process of biological evolution, has been accomplished by the survival from age to age of the fittest to survive; that is, by the subjection and elimination of the weak and the simple by the more powerful and sophisticated. And the disposition to exploit manifested by every animal that breathes, from philosopher to fish, is a disposition which has been implanted in the natures of living- beings by the necessities of evolution. The great task of reforming the universe, therefore, is the task of eliminating from the natures of its inhabitants the disposition to be inhospitable, egoistic, and merciless, which has been everywhere developed by evolution.
In the ideal universe the life and happiness of no being are contingent upon the suffering and death of any other. And the fact that in this universe of ours life and happiness have been and are today so largely maintained by the infliction of indescribable misery and extinction, is the most pathetic, the most stupendous, and the most sickening contemplation that ever invaded human mind. It is encouraging to know, however, that life in its highest forms, that is, as represented by the most cultured aggregates of the human species, is evolving rapidly and irrepressibly toward the ideal, that is, toward a social state in which the interests and life of each individual being are more and more equally precious. What are civilization and morality? What do we mean by ethical progress? The growth of consideration for others—nothing more—simply cessation of, or abstinence from, exploitation. Courtesy, kindness, justice, altruism, humanity, what are they? They are the qualities which distinguish those who put themselves in the place of others, who recognize the existence and the preciousness of others, and who act upon others as they themselves would be pleased to have others act upon them. Otherism is the antithesis of laissez faire. The growth of civility in the earth is the growth of the principle or consciousness of solidarity among its inhabitants.
Vegetarianism, therefore, that is, abstinence from non-human exploitation or the recognition of universal solidarity, is related from this exalted standpoint to the logic of the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence and the modern movements of social reform. The sympathies of the consistent vegetarian go out naturally to the stricken and oppressed everywhere—to Cuba in her struggle for autonomy, to Ireland in her misery, to the helpless quadruped quivering under the pole-ax, and to the pitiable proletarian who goes up and down the monopolized universe seeking in vain for opportunities to earn honest nutrition. The vegetarian who is conscious enough to be consistent is in love with the universe, not simply with his wife or clan or species. He strives to be graceful to every being whose destinies he contacts, however humble or hopeless or eccentric that being maybe.
I am a vegetarian because I believe that present-day ethics is founded on that puerile, pre-Darwinian delusion that all other kinds of creatures and all worlds were created explicitly for the hominine species. Vegetarianism is the ethical corollary of evolution. It is simply the expansion of ethics to suit the biological revelations of Charles Darwin. Evolution has taught us the kinship of all creatures. The ancient hiatus between man and the other animals has been effectually sewed up. Biology teaches us, if it teaches us anything, that there is a solidarity of the sentient world. Man is simply one of a series of sentients, differing in degree but not in kind from the creatures below and around him. The ox he enslaves and slays and the poor reptile that wriggles in his pathway are his brothers, partaking of his nature and sharing his destiny. Man is simply the adult of long evolution, and his qualities are, of course, found along down among the juveniles and infants of the sentient world. The industrious bee, the civilized ant, the devoted steed, the mischievous ape, the irascible serpent, the sagacious elephant, the beautiful gazelle and the great, honest ox have within them in embryo all the emotions that roll through the soul of man. Fear, love, fidelity, hate, jealousy, joy, selfishness, curiosity, remorse, are all found everywhere, and they are the same passions that heave your breast and mine. Chastity, sobriety, obedience, persona] cleanliness, industry, sympathy; self-control, friendship, heroism, sagacity—many dogs and other semi-civilized animals have all these qualities, and in a degree greater even than whole races of men. And these faculties and capacities of the non-hominine world are the same identical faculties and capacities that you have and I have. Industry and ingenuity in the beaver are just as genuine and just as commendable as the same qualities in man. The faithful dog who stood over the lifeless body of his master grieving for recognition and starting at every flutter of his garments till he himself died of starvation, was just as noble as if he had all his days walked on his hind legs and worn a cane. The wild bird who takes her life in her wings to save her nestlings from the voracious serpent, and the mother bear away oil the Arctic snows who allows herself to be murdered in order to save her child, have just as genuine mother love and love just as sacred as that which burns in the breast of woman. The ingenious ant, which tends its fields, gathers its harvests, keeps slaves and armies and goes to war, and performs about all the antics of civilized man except maltreating the females and drinking gin, is not less civilized, and its civilization is not less real, because it is miniature. And the Christian who goes to church on Sunday and wails long prayers and then goes home and stuffs his alimentary with the quivering vitals of his naive fellows, and through the week lashes the flanks of his overburdened horse till the strained tendons are ready to snap, is not less criminal because he is strategic, and his crimes are not less infernal because they have no penalty’ but his conscience and no judge but himself. Whether we realize it or not the doctrine that on mankind’s account all the rest of the animal world came into being and that all non-human beings are mere hunks devoid of all psychic qualities found in man, is a doctrine not one whit more sagacious than the old geocentric theory of the universe.
Man has defined himself as the “paragon of the universe.” I do not say that he is not. I simply say that if he is, the universe has no cause for dry eyes. Man’s treatment of his own kind and especially his conduct toward the forms of life differing from him have been such as to brand him as a most ill-mannered and immodel organism. Human beings have been sufficiently clever and sufficiently devoted to each other to evolve into the masters of the earth, but instead of converting themselves into preceptors for the conquered races, they have become the butchers of the universe. Instead of becoming the models and school-masters of the world in which they have outstripped, and striving to repair the clumsy natures and regulate the straying feet of those by means of whom they have been hoisted into distinction, they have become colossal pedants and assassins, proclaiming themselves the pets and gods of creation and teaching each other that other races are mere fixtures to furnish food and amusement for themselves. They inculcate as a rule of conduct—and they preach it valiantly— that each should act upon others as he himself would choose to be acted upon. This ideal of social rectitude has been promulgated by the sages of the species for more than 2,000 years. But with miserable pusillanimity they confine its application to the members of their own species. No non-human is too innocent or too interesting or too wonderful to escape the most frightful humiliations, if by those humiliations human comfort or human amusement or human whim is in any way whatever garnished.
Look at the horse! No nobler and more beautiful creature is found in all the animal realm. A marvel of strength, speed and splendor. The most useful and most consummate associate of man. What wonderful possibilities of reciprocity! Man takes the horse from the plains, where he is exposed to the inclemencies of weather, the contingencies of food and the blunders of his own childlike nature. He gives him regular meals, pleasant shelter, intellectual surroundings, and a home. The horse in return gives man the benefit of his superior strength and speed, bearing man and his burdens and supplementing in a thousand ways the inadequate energies of his mentor. These are the possibilities, the ideal—gigantic strength supplementing superior wisdom. Beautiful reciprocity! What are the actualities? Sad, indeed! The horse is not an associate but a slave. He has no rights, and is seldom suspected of being entitled to feelings or vanities at all. He is treated as if he had merely existence and usefulness. He is neglected, overburdened and overworked, beaten, insulted, starved, maimed, misunderstood, deprived of leisure and liberty, unconsidered—doomed to an environment out of which has been drained every element calculated to promote his happiness and intelligence and perpetuate his nobility and beauty. He is a mere suggestion of the might-have-been. His regal neck has wilted; the splendid flanks are lean and drawn; the ambitious face is sad. The proud galloper of the plains, the companion of the winds, bearing fire in his nostrils and thunder in his hoofs, has become a soured, impoverished, broken-hearted but faithful wreck. The stars of heaven never looked down on a more pitiful sight than that of a horse, after having drudged all his days in the service of his lord, cast out in his helpless old age to wander and perish.
Our own happiness and that of our species are believed to be so much more important than that of others that we sacrifice without scruple the most sacred prerogatives of others in order that our own may be fastidiously trimmed. Even for a tooth or a feather to wear on our vanity marauders are sent through the forests of the earth to ravage and depopulate them. Beautiful beings which fill the woods with song and juvenility are compelled to sprawl lifeless and disheveled on the skulls of unconscionable sillies. Criminal and inconvenient races are exterminated with eager and superfluous violence. Thousands of innocent and helpless souls are caught up and carried by unfeeling emissaries into foul dungeons and there doomed by ghoulish clowns of science to the most protracted, useless, and damning victimizations. It is enough almost to make villains weep—the cold-blooded manner in which human beings cut the throats, dash out the brains, and discuss the flavor of their victims at their cannibalistic feasts.
Look at the scenes to be met with in all our streets and stockyards! An army of butchers standing in blood ankle deep and working themselves to exhaustion carving the throats of their helpless fellows—unsuspecting oxen with limpid eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax and a moment later lying a-quiver under its relentless thud—struggling swine swinging by their hinders with their life leaping from their gashed jugulars—an atmosphere in perpetual chum with the groans and yells of the massacred—streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals—everywhere corpses dangling from sale-hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks—men and women kneeling nightly by their pillow sides and congratulating themselves on their whiteness and rising and leaping on the bloody remains of some slaughtered fellow—such are the spectacles in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the enormities perpetrated day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenceless dumb ones of this world.
Holy days, days above all others when it seems men’s minds would be bent on compassion, are farces of gluttony and ferocity. Unfeeling ruffians cowardly shoot down defenceless birds or prowl the country in rival squads massacreing every living creature that is not able to escape them—and for no higher or humaner purpose than just to see who can kill the most! This is egoism unparalleled on the face of the earth. No species of animal except man plunges to such depths of atrocity. It is bad enough in ail conscience for one being to suppress another in order to tear it to pieces and swallow it, but when such outrages are perpetrated by organized packs just for pastime it becomes an enormity beyond characterization. The insectivora, the carnivora, and the reptilia are cruel. It is horrible to contemplate the enormous wickedness perpetrated on the less offensive races by these relentless brutes. But the crimes committed by the hominine species are the most insolent and extravagant in the universe. Non-human murderers are ruthless, but even serpents and hyenas do not exterminate for sport. A universe is, indeed, to be pitied whose dominating inhabitants are so unconscious, so irresponsible, and so ethically repulsive that they make life a commodity, mercy a disease, and systematic massacre a pastime and a profession.
I am a vegetarian because I believe in the golden rule. Act toward others as you would that others would act toward you, has been the basic precept of the morals of the generations. This wonderful rule has been mouthed and mouthed since the days of Confucius, 2,400 years ago. But it never has been lived. Do as you would be done by. Certainly. But to whom? Each class or clan has been its own little clique to whom it after a fashion observed this rule. Slavery and slaughter have been the rule toward everyone else. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt the wood-deer today. A Roman could take the life of his Gallic slave with as perfect impunity as an American can slay his bovine servant today. Yet to kill a Gaul was as really murder as to kill a Roman. It hasn’t been very long since all the Christian nations hunted their dusky brethren in Africa and sold and loaned and lashed them as we do the horse today. All these crimes are now matters of course to us. It is the same old story. We can see behind us but not around us. After so many centuries the solidarity of our species has dimly dawned on us, but we can not discern the solidarity of all the animal world. We go on daily committing crimes as horrible as those we execrate. And we do it for the very same reason our long line of ancestors have done it, because the human mind is too feeble to be conscious of all the complicated relations which it is called upon to be conscious of.
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 had no rights because he was a “barbarian.” The fact that he had 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 an average 16 per cent., and beef 17½ percent.; 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 round 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 in creasing 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 r 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 homorrhage 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 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 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 into one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of Peace, Justice and Solidarity.