THE VEGETARIAN TRIUMPH.
WE do not quite understand why vegetarians are so triumphant at the result of the pedestrian contest just completed between Berlin and Vienna. They have established a point, but it is one which, to all who knew the facts, was well established before. Provoked, it is said, by the example of the horsemen who recently performed the same feat, a number of pedestrians agreed on a walking-match between Berlin and Vienna, a distance of a hundred and fifty miles. About seventy competitors presented themselves, and although they were forbidden to walk at night, the first two covered the ground at the rate of more than fifty miles a day. They were both vegetarians; and all vegetarians point to the achievement as proof that their system of diet in no way interferes with health or physical endurance. It is no proof of health whatever; and as to endurance, who that knew anything of the subject ever put forward any serious doubt? If there is one thing certain about the races which eat no meat, it is that they can march. Thousands, probably scores of thousands, of Sikhs and Hindostanees would have performed the German feat, and not have thought at the end of it that they had done anything wonderful, and they not only eat no meat, but they are the descendants of men who have eaten no meat for perhaps two thou- sand years. They have eaten wheat or millet, and drunk plenty of milk ; and they can walk rapidly as long as life remains in them, A Sepoy regiment which means it, will walk a European regiment to death, and do it on food which their competitors would pronounce wholly insufficient to sustain vigorous life. A regular Hindostanee carrier, with a weight of 80 lb. on his shoulders—carried, of course, in two divisions hung on his neck by a yoke—will, if properly paid, lope along over a hundred miles in twenty-four hours, a feat which would exhaust any but the best-trained English runners. We feel, indeed, some doubt whether the relation between the power of walking and what is properly called " physical strength " is at all a close one. Many classes of Bengalees, who are a feeble folk, seem in walking tireless ; and it is within the knowledge of us all that many compara- tively feeble Englishmen can walk all day, and sit down at
the end far less fatigued than men who, in a struggle, would throw them in five minutes on their backs. Weight has much to do with it, and lung condition, and, above all, a certain soundness of the sinews which has no more relation to the strength of those sinews than the tenacity of a fibre, silk for example, has to its bulk.
Nor is the strength derived from a vegetable diet confined to any particular race. Highlanders fed on milk and porridge are the most active gamekeepers in the world; and half-a- century ago the best rough masons in Scotland, the best ploughmen in England, were men reared on a diet in which meat played no part. Those facts prove that men can live and grow strong when fed only on vegetarian food ; but they do not prove that Providence or Evolution, in providing us with flesh-tearing teeth, made a wasteful blunder. The health of the vegetarian races is not equal to that of the races which eat both flesh and farinaceous food. They live, on the average, at least ten years less. They die of disease much more readily,—so readily, that in the face of some diseases, small- pox especially, they seem to have no resisting-power at all, and for certain forms of exertion, especially those which in- volve strain on the spine, they have nothing like equal strength. As to energy, there is no comparison. The flesh- eating races have mastered the world, and the Northern Asiatics, who eat meat, have, with their comparatively insignificant numbers, conquered the innumerable vege- tarians of India whenever they have invaded them. Indeed, when energy is required as well as strength, the vege- tarians instinctively recur to a flesh diet. Our own miners eat much meat, and there is a carefully authenticated Indian story which seems almost conclusive. A Hindoo tribe con- tracted with the Peninsular Railway Company to do the cutting work essential for the ascent of the railway over the Western Ghauts. The work was terrible, and had to be done at speed; and after a few weeks' experience the tribe found it hopelessly beyond their powers. As the pay was very good, and their pride as workmen deeply involved, they were almost in despair; but fortunately the whole tribe, and not a division of it, had taken the contract. They called, therefore, a caste meeting, decided that during the continuance of the work they were at liberty to eat beef, finished their contract with perfect success and much profit, and were thenceforward strict vegetarians again, with intermissions for the sake of business.
We'believe the truth about vegetarianism to be this,—that it almost invariably injures those who adopt it after being accustomed to a flesh diet ; that it requires invariably and absolutely a consumption of milk not easy to secure in Northern Europe, but that at the cost of some energy and much power of resisting disease, the majority of men can live on vegetables without any grave reduction in their physical strength. They can do most kinds of hard work—not all— as well as their neighbours, and can do sedentary work pro- bably a little better, though we must add that, owing to diminished energy, they are usually not equally inclined to do it. They lose a recurrent pleasure of some value, the satisfaction of being full-fed—your vegetarian feeling hunger frequently and sharply—but they gain quite remarkably in the cost of their food. The reduction in expense is consider- able in all cases; and if Europeans could be taught the full value as food of haricot-beans, of lentils, and of millet, as con- taining not only nourishment but nitrogen, and could obtain milk at reasonable cost, the reduction would be very great, indeed, probably more than one-half. In an experiment we heard of lately, in which the haricot-beans were much employed, the saving was greater than that; and indeed the question only needs discussion because of the price of milk, and because of a rather exaggerated idea as to the quantity of vegetable- food which must be provided, a quantity which varies not only with each person, but with the kind of food consumed. A man may eat garden-stuff all day, and not get the sustenance which he will obtain out of a comparatively small quantity of beans, millet, or wheat. Economy is the unquestionable "pull" of vegetarianism, and we should say the only one, though the practice does not diminish strength in anything like the proportion which flesh-eaters imagine. They confuse strength and energy, and forget that the mass of mankind never can, or will, get anything but the cereals and other vegetables to eat. To abandon flesh-diet is not to advance, but only to go back to the involuntary practice of the majority of the uncivilised.
As to the moral advantage of vegetarianism, it rests, so far as we can see, on no evidence at all. Meat-eating is said to develop brutality, but, as a matter of fact, it is the civilised and self-controlled classes who are the greatest eaters of meat. The English gentleman is the largest and most habitual eater of flesh, and is on the whole the best man extant ; nor do we know that the Tartar, who practically eats only meat, is a bit worse than the Hindoo, who practically lives entirely upon grain. There is not the slightest moral difference perceptible among the poor who get meat and the poor who avoid it, nor will any honest and sensible man aver that he finds a distinct moral difference in himself—we exclude, of course, the question of alcohol, though it is strictly vegetarian food—because he has changed his diet. The hereditary Christians of India, who eat anything, are on the whole better than the Hindoos, whom the vegetarians are trying, in an unsuitable climate, to imitate or excel,—we say excel, for a Hindoo may eat anything offered in sacrifice. Hunger is a foe to morality ; but the method of relieving hunger, pro- vided the food is honestly acquired, matters nothing to morality. The vegetarian races are as cruel, as lustful, and as wilful as the flesh-eating peoples, and incline, we should say, to be decidedly more vindictive. Certainly, we would rather offend a prosperous English artisan with two flesh- meals a day, than a Sicilian sawyer fed on macaroni and melons. There is nothing to be made of that argument, or of its relative, the brutality of killing animals for food. It is awfully brutal not to kill them. We wonder if the people who repeat this argument so glibly, and who are really more shocked by the ugly look of shambles than by any destruction of life, have ever reflected for a moment how animals die when they are not killed by human beings. They die either of bites or kicks from other animals, or of disease usually painful and protracted, or of starvation, the latter being, so to speak, the regular course of death arranged by Nature. The horse, in particular, dies in this way with his teeth fast locked together ; while the bullock pines away to a ghastly skeleton. There is much to be done which ought to be done to make the death of the edible animals painless, and especially to avoid the agony of fright frequently inflicted on them; but the death itself is a mercy, and would be one even if they did not obtain such compensation in good food and good treatment, and the removal of the perpetual fear which torments all animals left in their natural condition. They are always watching for expected enemies. Of course, to those who deny to man the right to take life—as the Hindoo in theory does, though he makes a large exception for sacrifice, and does not deny the right of killing in war—this argument is worthless; but then they should, for the sake of logic, go a step further, —refuse to eat fish because it has life, eggs because they have potential life, and animalcules because life cannot be measured by size. Indeed, we are not sure that they should stop even there. In these days of hyper-sensitive faddists, we are almost afraid to suggest it lest some man with a conscience should be moved not to eat at all ; but it is not yet proved beyond possibility of doubt that plants are devoid of life. A nastur- tium will creep along a trellis as if it liked the support, and suppose the liking is conscious, as conscious, say, as a ben's fear of a chalk-line, or a parrot's amusement when it has said something funny, what would an unhappy " vegetarian " on principle resolve to do P He would have to live upon sand, or depart, as a tiger would if it were suddenly afflicted with a moral sense, from a world so badly organised that nothing within it could exist without destroying life.
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