9
method of life man will regain health, and with it, as a natural consequence, sanity and virtue. Let man renounce fermented beverages, and the grain wasted on intoxicating liquor would be available for food. The matter devoted to the fattening of an ox would afford ten times the sustenance if taken direct from the land. Shelley thought that commerce generated vice, selfishness, and corruption, making the distance even greater between the richest and the poorest, and begetting a luxury that would be "the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure." The influence of hereditary disease would gradually be weakened by a return to nature. He ends by advice to those who may choose to try the system, and by personal testimony as to its advantages.
Such is a meagre outline of this remarkable essay, of which a cheap reprint, edited by Mr. H. S. Salt and myself, has been issued. This has also been included in the publications of the Shelley Society. There is nothing fresh in the scientific averments or mythological speculations of the essay which are avowedly accepted on the authority of Newton's book. The interest resides in Shelley's way of looking at the food problem of the nation and the race. He goes to the root of the question when he says: "The whole of human science is comprised in one question—How can the advantages of intellect and civilisation be reconciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life? 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? Thus he says: "Whenever the cause of disease shall be discovered, the root, from which all vice and misery have so long overshadowed the globe, will lie bare to the axe. All the exertions of man, from that moment, may be considered as tending to the clear profit of his species. No sane mind in a sane body resolves upon a real crime. It is a man of violent passions, blood-shot eyes, and swollen veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder."
Then there are considerations of the national aspects of the question. "The change," says Shelley, "which would be produced by simpler habits on political economy is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolising eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devour-
