William Edward Armytage Axon

“ Those who are not satisfied that man, who ought to be only a little lower than the angels, should for ever live by the torture and misery of his fellow-creatures must devise some way for his escape from the thraldom of evil. If any better expedient than that suggested by Shelley can be found by all means let it be propounded. At present we see that the poverty and misery of the poor, the luxury and sensuality of the rich, whilst equally hurtful, are largely preventible. It is certain that man can live without the use of intoxicants, and without the use of animal flesh. ”

“ Still the generous mind refuses to be contented with a future for humanity that leaves the poor in their wretchedness; that makes one man die of sensual surfeit whilst another perishes of starvation; that dooms men to war upon their brother men until the judgment day; a future in which cruelty, lust, oppression, and wrongdoing are to be permanent elements. Man is surely worthy of a better fate than to be the tyrant of a world filled with the victims of his unbridled appetites and remorseless power. Man is the butcher of creation. ”

“ Why, then, should man turn into liquid poison the golden grain intended for his food? Why should there continue to rise from the earth a chorus of pain, the cries of the creatures who are tortured and slain, to gratify his needless desires? ”

“ In the same way he explains the consequences of eating of the tree of evil by Adam and Eve as an allegory that disease and crime have flowed from unnatural diet. Shelley points out that man resembles no carnivorous animal; that physiology indicates him to be a vegetable feeder; and that his loss of instinct in the matter of food can be paralleled by instances of other animals trained to reject their natural aliment. Man's adoption of a wrong diet brings him a diseased system. "Crime is madness: madness is disease." ”

“ The monopolising eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal, and many loaves of bread would cease to contribute to gout, madness, and apoplexy, in the shape of a pint of porter or a dram of gin, when appeasing the long-protracted famine of the bard-working peasants' hungry babes. The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth. ”

“ On a natural system of diet, we should require no spices from India; nor wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira; none of those multitudinous articles of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is rifled, and which are the cause of so much individual rivalship, such calamitous and sanguinary national disputes."
Shelley's Vegetarianism was that of the idealist and the world-builder; of the prophets and the sons of the prophets, who amidst the darkness of the night see afar the heralding gleams of the coming dawn. A world without poverty, without war, without disease ”

“ A land redeemed from its curses; where industry would ensure plenty, and where the forces of the world would be working for the solid happiness of the race. Shelley was not the first, nor, let us hope, the last, to see this beatific vision. When Isaiah called upon the people of Israel to obey the everlastingly divine rules, he painted in glowing colours the beauty of the City of the Just, where men should live out their days in peace and righteousness. The Hebrew prophet and the English poet both declare that in the Holy Mountain of the Lord "they shall not hurt nor destroy." ”

“ Shelley, however, did not formally adopt Vegetarianism until the spring of 1812. Harriet Westbrook wrote from Dublin to Miss Hitchiner, on March 14th, 1812, "You do not know that we have forsworn meat and adopted the Pythagorean system. About a fortnight has elapsed since the change, and we do not find ourselves any the worse for it. . . . We are delighted with it, and think it the best thing in the world." ”

“ How can we take the benefits and reject the evils of the system which is now interwoven with all the fibres of our being?" This thought is constantly recurring—how shall the greatest happiness of all be secured? ”

“ Writing to Leigh Hunt, 29th June, 1817, the poet says, "Do not mention that I am unwell to your nephew, for the advocate of a new system of diet is held bound to be invulnerable by disease, in the same manner as the sectaries of a new system of religion are held to be more moral than other people, or a reformed Parliament must at least be assumed as the remedy of all political evils. ”

“ The poet's wide-reaching sympathy touches all sentient beings; in the same spirit of the Higher Pantheism that breathes in the Song of the Sun of St. Francis of Assissi, he beholds in all the manifestations of the Divine.
It is easy for the careless, and the indifferent, no less than the sensual or the vicious, to deride such an ideal. It is possible even for those who would desire it to be true to be convinced of the impossibility of its realisation. There are men and women who acknowledge with pain Nature "red in tooth and claw" ”

“ The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater licence of the privilege, by subjection to supernumery diseases. ”

“ Perhaps he adopted the Byronic diet just as he adopted the Byronic shirt collar. in imitation of the poet whom he admired so greatly."— ("Real Shelley," Vol. ii., p. 143.) But what evidence is there that Shelley knew of Byron's spasmodic displays of Vegetarianism? Shelley's first essay was but of short duration, for the poet with his wife and sister-in-law left Dublin for Holyhead "at two o'clock in the afternoon of Saturday, April 4. They tacked against a baffling wind to get clear of land; the whole of Sunday they struggled against the breeze ”