11
deed is done in a fit of abstraction, and the poor unfortunate is hung by the law as a warning to others. Suppose the killing idea had been obliterated from the so-called murderer's knowledge, from the food he ate, and that a vegetable diet had always been his and good passionless thoughts had been practiced from childhood up,—could the murder ever have been committed? Never! The man could not have been capable of the deed." Anon.
"One thing aids these oriental mystics: they eat no meat; and this is in keeping with a great law of nature. The more a nation abstains from the consumption of meat, the more temperate and gentle it is, and hence the better prepared for spiritual things." Anon.
Says Bronson Alcott: "Meat is out of all fitness, the opposite of spiritual food. We should subsist on vegetables and fruits, to be divine. When we pluck the apple above our head, eating is an aspiration; and the clustering grapes of our own arbor shed their soft purples in mellowing light upon the whiteness of our souls."
Thoreau observes: "I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition, has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food. . . . I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual inprovement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other, when they come in contact with the more civilized."
Under a true system of civilization, cannibalism towards animals would seem as abhorrent as does now cannibalism towards humans.
"Oh the horrors of the slaughter house! Every animal killed knows the one who takes its life, but it is helpless, yet it resists, but cannot escape the death blow; realizing the cruelty, and wrong, that makes every nerve cry out in remontrance, and its blood curdles and boils in its veins with fear and dread of what is coming; and this condition produces a high state of fever that poisons every atom of its flesh; and when eaten it causes disease that brings death to the eater, sooner or later." J. H. Neff.
