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"CIVILIZED CANNIBALS."
Murdering is the business of the people!
Beasts, birds, fish, all are murdered!
The pelted ox is in the car; he is crazy at the rush;
How wild and big his eyes!
He snuffs murder ahead!
A man knocks him down and stabs him!
Dead so quick?
His carcass is "decently" cut into slices,
And eaten by civilized cannibals:
Is there no other way to live?
Angels! are there any slaughter-houses in your country?
O chemists, psychologists, ethnologists!
Try your skill at extracting pabulum from all things,
Without the destruction of life!
Save us the universal crime of murdering
And devouring the innocent!
"I believe that vegetable diet has a decided action upon the mind. In a kind of way it dematerializes the mind: the grosser elements are kept in subjection and the spiritual rises predominant. . . . The practice of vegetarianism will play a most important part in refining the masses and rendering them less coarse and brutal. . . . Evolution is going on in our food the same as in other things." Lady Paget.
The earth-world, in its "civilized" portions at least, is now being brought in touch with the heavenly world, to an extent probably never before experienced. As one of the results of this spiritual overshadowing, may we not look for an entire abandonment, ultimately, by the civilized world, of every form of animal food? In other words, will not the animal magnetism eventually be overcome, neutralized, displaced, superceded, swept away from the earth, by spiritual magnetism, and man emerge from his animalism, cast out the beast that is now within him, cease to be brutal, and cruel, and war-like, and, looking upward for guidance through the spiritual faculties, instead of downward through the animal, become at last truly human, and achieve for himself the glorious and peaceful destiny which Nature designed for him as a mortal being capacitated to walk hand in hand with the angels?
