Why I Am a Vegetarian

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 Ever and anon, as the ages bloom, old forms of thought are superseded by intellectual bran-news.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. H. M.

Chicago, May, 1895.

“What more advance can mortals make in sin? Deaf 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 those 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” included 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.