The Ethics of Diet - Howard Williams

Скачать книгу

that, if slaughtering for food were to be abolished, there would be a failure of manufacturing material for the ordinary uses of social life, is, in reality, based upon a contracted apprehension of facts and phenomena. For it is a reasonable and sufficient reply, that the whole history of civilisation, as it has been a history of the slow but, upon the whole, continuous advance of the human race in the arts of Refinement, so, also, has it proved that demand creates supply—that it is the absence of the former alone which permits the various substances, no less than the various forces, yet latent in Nature to remain uninvestigated and unused. Nor can any thoughtful person, who knows anything of the history of Science and Discovery, doubt that the resources of Nature and the mechanical ingenuity of man are all but boundless. Already, notwithstanding the absence of any demand for them, excepting within the ranks of anti-kreophagists, various non-animal substances have been proposed, in some cases used, as substitutes for the prepared skins of the victims of the Slaughter-house; and that, in the event of a general demand for such substitutes, there would spring up an active competition among inventors and manufacturers in this direction there is not the least reason for doubt. Besides, it must be taken into account that the process of conversion of the flesh-eating (that is to say, of the richer) sections of communities to the bloodless diet will, only too certainly, be very slow and gradual.

      As for the popular—perhaps the most popular—fallacy (the eidolon fori), which exhibits little of philosophical accuracy, or, indeed, of common reason, involved in the questions: “What is to become of the animals?” and, “Why were they created, if they are not intended for Slaughter and for human food?”—it is scarcely possible to return a grave reply. The brief answer, of course, is—that those variously-tortured beings have been brought into existence, and their numbers maintained, by selfish human invention only. Cease to breed for the butcher, and they will cease to exist beyond the numbers necessary for lawful and innocent use; they were “created” indeed, but they have been created by man, since he has vastly modified and, by no means, for the benefit of his helpless dependants, the natural form and organisation of the original types, the parent stocks of the domesticated Ox, Sheep, and Swine, now very remote from the native grandeur and vigour of the Bison, the Mouflon, and the wild Boar.

      There remains one fallacy of quite recent origin. An association has been formed—somewhat late in the day, it must be allowed—consisting of a few sanitary reformers, who put forward, also, humane reasons, for “Reform of the Slaughter-Houses,” one of the secondary propositions of which is, that the savagery and brutality of the Butchers’ trade could be obviated by the partial or general use of less lingering and revolting modes of killing than those of the universal knife and axe. No humanitarian will refuse to welcome any sign, however feeble, of the awakening of the conscience of the Community, or rather of the more thoughtful part of it, to the paramount obligations of common Humanity, and of the recognition of the claims of the subject species to some consideration and to some compassion, if not of the recognition of the claims of Justice; or will refuse to welcome any sort of proposition to lessen the enormous sum total of atrocities to which the lower animals are constantly subjected by human avarice, gluttony, and brutality. But, at the same time, no earnest humanitarian can accept the sophism, that an attempt at a mitigation of cruelty and suffering which, fundamentally, are unnecessary, ought to satisfy the educated conscience or reason. Vainly do the more feeling persons, who happen to have some scruples of conscience in respect to the sanction of the barbarous practice of Butchering, think to abolish the cruelties, while still indulging the appetite for the flesh luxuries, of the Table. The vastness of the demands upon the butchers—demands constantly increasing with the pecuniary resources of the nation, and stimulated by the pernicious example of the wealthy classes; the immensity of the traffic in “live stock” (as they complacently are termed) by rail and by ship,[2] the frightful horrors of which it has often been attempted, though inadequately, to describe; the utter impossibility of efficiently supervising and regulating such traffic and such slaughter—even supposing the desire to do so to exist to any considerable extent—and the inveterate indifferentism of the Legislature and of the influential classes, sufficiently declare the futility of such expectation and of the indulgence of such comfortable hope. It is, in brief, as with other attempts at patching and mending, or at applying salves to a hopelessly festered and gangrened wound, merely to put the “flattering unction” of compromise to the conscience. “Diseases, desperate grown, by desperate appliances are relieved, or not at all;” the foul stream of cruelty must be stopped at its source; the fountain and origin of the evil—the Slaughter-House itself—must be abolished. Delendum est Macellum.

      It has been well said by one of the most eloquent of the prophets of Humane Living, that there are steps on the way to the summit of Dietetic Reform, and, if only one step be taken, yet that that single step will be not without importance and without influence in the world. The step, which leaves for ever behind it the barbarism of slaughtering our fellow-beings, the Mammals and Birds, is, it is superfluous to add, the most important and most influential of all.

      As for the plan of the present work, living writers and authorities—numerous and important as they are—necessarily have been excluded. Its bulk, already extended beyond the original conception of its limits, otherwise would have been swollen to a considerably larger size. For its entire execution, as well as for the collection and arrangement of the matter, the compiler alone is responsible; and, conscious that it must fall short of the completeness at which he aimed, he can pretend only to the merits of careful research and an eclectic impartiality. To the fact that the work already has appeared in the pages of the Dietetic Reformer, to which it has been contributed periodically during a space of time extending over five years, is owing some repetition of matter, which also, necessarily, is due to the nature of the subject. Errors of inadvertence, it is hoped, will be found to be few and inconsiderable. For the rest, he leaves the Ethics of Diet to the candour of the critics and of the public.

      THE ETHICS OF DIET.

       HESIOD. EIGHTH CENTURY B.C.

       Table of Contents

      HESIOD—the poet par excellence of peace and of agriculture, as Homer is of war and of the “heroic” virtues—was born at Ascra, a village in Bœotia, a part of Hellas, which, in spite of its proverbial fame for beef-eating and stupidity, gave birth to three other eminent persons—Pindar, the lyric poet, Epameinondas, the great military genius and statesman, and Plutarch, the most amiable moralist of antiquity.

      The little that is known of the life of Hesiod is derived from his Works and Days. From this celebrated poem we learn that his father was an emigrant from Æolia, the Greek portion of the north-west corner of the Lesser Asia; that his elder brother, Perses, had, by collusion with the judges, deprived him of his just inheritance; that after this he settled at Orchomenos, a neighbouring town—in the pre-historical ages a powerful and renowned city. This is all that is certainly known of the author of the Works and Days, and The Theogony. Of the genuineness of the former there has been little or no doubt; that of the latter—at least in part—has been called in question. Besides these two chief works, there is extant a piece entitled The Shield of Herakles, in imitation of the Homeric Shield (Iliad xviii.) The Catalogues of Women—a poem commemorating the heroines beloved by the gods, and who were thus the ancestresses of the long line of heroes, the reputed founders of the ruling families in Hellas—is lost.

      The charm of the Works and Days—the first didactic poem extant—is its apparent earnestness of purpose and simplicity of style. The author’s frequent references to, and rebuke of, legal injustices—his sense of which had been quickened by the iniquitous decisions of the judges already referred to—are as naïve as they are pathetic.

      Of the Theogony, the subject, as the title implies, is the history of the generation and successive dynasties of the Olympian divinities—the objects of Greek worship. It may, indeed, be styled the Hellenic Bible, and, with the Homeric Epics, it formed the principal theology of the old Greeks, and of the later Romans or Latins. The “Proœmium,” or introductory

Скачать книгу