Page:Henry Stephens Salt - A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays.pdf/72

Rh, or too speedily replaced by the knowledge that there is no primitive form of food—albuminous. starchy, osseous—in the animal world itself ; and that all the processes of catching an inferior animal, of breeding it, rearing it, keeping it, killing it, dressing it, and selling it, mean no more and no less than entirely additional expenditure throughout for bringing into what we have been taught to consider an acceptable form of food the veritable food which the animal itself found, without any such preparation, in the vegetable world.” This being so, let us recur to the point to which Sir Henry Thompson brought us. If flesh-food be, as he admits, entirely unnecessary, will not this additional consideration of economy turn the balance when we make our choice of diet? Will a nation whose food supply is becoming a matter of more and more anxiety persist in spending six times as much money as it is obliged to spend. in order that it may not interfere with “the present generally recognised sources and varieties of food ?” Are we to renounce the full economic advantages of a vegetarian diet system, because we are reminded that an infant is nourished on milk and Esquimaux on blubber?