Howard Williams

“ When a large and gentle Ox, after having resisted a ten times greater force of blows than would have killed his murderers, falls stunned at last, and his armed head is fastened to the ground with cords; as soon as the wide wound is made, and the jugular veins are cut asunder, what mortal can, without horror and compassion, hear the painful bellowings, intercepted by his flow of blood, the bitter sighs that speak the sharpness of his anguish, and the deep-sounding groans with loud anxiety, fetched from the bottom of his strong and palpitating heart. ”

“ For this reason, perhaps, food passes into excrement that we may not be lovers of luxury. If it were not so—if it were not useless and injurious to the body, we should hardly abstain from devouring one another. If the belly received as much as it pleased, digested it, and conveyed it to the body, we should see battles and wars innumerable. Even as it is, when part of our food passes into ordure, part into blood, part into spurious and useless phlegm, we are, nevertheless, so addicted to luxury that we spend, perhaps, whole estates on a meal. ”

“ Is it not absurd, then, whereas we see that many of our own species live by brute sense alone, and exhibit neither reason nor intellect, and that very many of them surpass the most terrible wild beasts in cruelty, rage, rapine; that they murder even their own relatives; that they are tyrants and the tools of tyrants—seeing all this, is it not absurd, I say, to hold that we are obliged by nature to act leniently towards them, while no kindness is due from us to the Ox that ploughs, the Dog that is brought up with us, and those who nourish us with their milk and cover our bodies with their wool? ”

“ And yet there is nothing which involves us in greater evils than following and settling our faith upon authority—considering those dogmas or practices best which have been received heretofore with the greatest applause, and which have a multitude of great names. We live not according to reason, but according to mere fashion and tradition, from whence that enormous heap of bodies, which fall one over the other. It happens as in a great slaughter of men, when the crowd presses upon itself. Not one falls without dragging with him another. ”

“ And if this man have children, if he bear in his heart objects which are so dear to him, how can he unceasingly surround himself with images of death—of that death which must deprive him one day of those whom he loves, or snatch himself away from their love? And if he be just, if he be good, how will he not have repugnance for acts which will continually recall to him ideas of ingratitude, of cruelty, and of violence? There exists in the East a tree which, by a mechanical movement, inclines its branches towards the traveller, whom it seems to invite to repose under its shade. ”

“ In the ardour and delicacy of his amorous expressions, can the most impassioned, the most respectful, human lover surpass the ‘glossy kind,’ as described by the most beautiful of all our poets?
“And, indeed, has not Nature given to almost every being the same spontaneous signs of the various affections? Admire we not in other animals whatever is most eloquent in man—the tremor of desire, the tear of distress, the piercing cry of anguish, the pity-pleading look—expressions which speak to the soul with a feeling which words are feeble to convey?” ”

“ That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel Evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the world, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he liked best to dwell upon was the image of One warring with an evil principle, oppressed not only by it but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity—a victim full of gratitude and of hope and of the spirit of triumph emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good.” Such was the conviction which inspired his greatest poem The Prometheus Unbound. ”

“ Where this sentiment is real, there can be no desire to profit by the sufferings of others. Yet, where the feelings of disgust for what is bad are weaker than inclination to the self-indulgence which it promises, there is no possibility of their triumphing. For gain the butcher slaughters the victim; for horrible luxury other men participate in this murder, while they devour the pieces of flesh, in which, a few moments before, the blood was still flowing, the nerves yet quivering, the life still breathing! ”

“ Before the time of the Deluge the nourishment which without violence men derived from the fruits which fell from the trees of themselves, and from the herbs which also ripened with equal ease, was, without doubt, some relic of the first innocence and of the gentleness (douceur) for which we were formed. Now to get food we have to shed blood in spite of the horror which it naturally inspires in us; and all the refinements of which we avail ourselves, in covering our tables, hardly suffice to disguise for us the bloody corpses which we have to devour to support life. ”

“ Why did it cause you anguish, when you saw a defenceless animal driven to slaughter? Because you felt, in your inmost soul, that it is wrong, that it is unjust to kill a defenceless and innocent being! With quite other feelings would you look on the death of a Tiger that attacks men, than on that of a Lamb who has done harm to no one. To the one action attaches, naturally, justice; to the other, injustice. ”

“ In order to avoid all the generous and spontaneous sympathies of compassion, the office of shedding blood is committed to the hands of a set of men who have been educated in inhumanity, and whose sensibility has been blunted and destroyed by early habits of barbarity. Thus men increase misery in order to avoid the sight of it, and because they cannot endure being obviously cruel themselves, or commit actions which strike painfully on their senses, they commission those to commit them who are formed to delight in cruelty, and to whom misery, torture, and shedding of blood is an amusement! ”

“ Do they recognise, then, no mind, no soul in them—have they not feeling, pleasure in existence, do they not suffer pain? Do their voices of joy and sorrow indeed fail to speak to the human heart and conscience—so that they can murder the jubilant lark, in the first joy of his spring-time, who ought to warm their hearts with sympathy, from delight in bloodshed or for their ‘sport,’ or with a horrible insensibility and recklessness only to practise their aim in shooting! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus, Custom has awakened the inhuman, fierce nature, which makes killing, handling, and feeding upon flesh and blood, without distinction, so easy and familiar unto mankind. And the same is to be understood of men killing and oppressing those of their own kind; for do we not see that a soldier, who is trained up in the wars of bloody-minded princes, shall kill a hundred men without any trouble or regret of spirit, and such as have given him no more offence than a sheep has given the butcher that cuts her throat. ”

“ To take away the life of any happy being, to commit acts of depredation and outrage, and to abandon every refined feeling and sensibility, is to degrade the human kind beneath its professed dignity of character; but to devour or eat any animal is an additional violation of those principles, because it is the extreme of brutal ferocity. Such is the conduct of the most savage of wild beasts, and of the most uncultivated and barbarous of our own species. Where is the person who, with calmness, can hear himself compared in disposition to a lion, a hyæna, a tiger or a wolf? ”

“ 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. ”

“ By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth to give a fair trial to the vegetable system. Reasoning is surely superfluous on a subject whose merits an experience of six months would set for ever at rest. But it is only among the enlightened and benevolent that so great a sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. ”

“ A cook-maid will weep at a tale of woe, while she is skinning a living eel; and the devotee will mock the Deity by asking a blessing on food supplied by murderous outrages against nature and religion! Even women of education, who readily weep while reading an affecting moral tale, will clear away clotted blood, still warm with departed life, cut the flesh, disjoint the bones, and tear out the intestines of an animal, without sensibility, without sympathy, without fear, without remorse. ”

“ Shall we leave the living herbs to seek, in the den of death, an obscene aliment? Insensible to the blooming beauties of Pomona—unallured by the fragrant odours that exhale from her groves of golden fruits—unmoved by the nectar of Nature, by the ambrosia of innocence—shall the voracious vultures of our impure appetites speed along those lovely scenes and alight in the loathsome sink of putrefaction to devour the remains of other creatures, to load with cadaverous rottenness a wretched stomach? ”

“ Damajanti: To me, too, residence in such a land would be torture. Yet, were I a man, had I the power of eloquence, I would go from village to village, from town to town, and vehemently denounce such horrors. I should think that I had achieved more than the founders of all religions, if I should succeed in inspiring men with sympathy for their fellow-beings. What is religious belief, if it tolerates this murder, or rather sanctions it? What is all Belief without Love? And what is a Love that excludes from its embrace the infinitely larger part of living beings? ”

“ If, however, you wait until the living and intelligent existence be deprived of life, and if it would disgust you to have to rend out the heart and shed the life-blood of your victim, why, I ask, in the very face of Nature, and in despite of her, do you feed on beings endowed with sentient life? But more than this—not even, after your victims have been killed, will you eat them just as they are from the slaughter-house. You boil, roast, and altogether metamorphose them by fire and condiments. ”

“ With much respect be it spoken, you who profess to be admirers of justice, beginning with the heroes of old, have every one of you, without exception, made the praise of Justice and the condemnation of Injustice turn solely upon the reputation and honour and gifts resulting from them. But what each is in itself, by its own peculiar force as it resides in the soul of its possessor, unseen either by gods or men, has never, in poetry or prose, been adequately discussed, so as to show that Injustice is the greatest bane that a soul can receive into itself, and Justice the greatest blessing. ”

“ Blind hero-worship or idolatry of genius or intellect, even when directed to high moral aims, is no part of our creed; and it is sufficient to be assured that he was human, to be free to confess that the historical founder of akreophagy was not exempt from human infirmity, and that he could not wholly rise above the wonder-loving spirit of an uncritical age. Deducting all that has been imputed to him of the fanciful or fantastic, enough still remains to force us to recognise in the philosopher-prophet of Samos one of the master-spirits of the world. ”

“ In fine, the more simple our tastes are the more universal are they, and the most common repugnance is for made-up dishes. Does one ever see a person have a disgust for water or bread? Behold here the impress of nature! Behold here, then, our rule of life. Let us preserve to the child as long as possible his primitive taste; let its nourishment be common and simple; let not its palate be familiarised to any but natural flavours, and let no exclusive taste be formed.... ”