Page:Henry Stephens Salt - A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays.pdf/74

Rh would hardly care to continue their ﬂesh-eating habits, merely in order to avoid adopting an “ism,” or limiting “the present varieties of food.”

We started with the admission that everybody must consult his own experience and taste in the matter of food, and l have now stated what seem to me to be the chief considerations worthy of notice in this choice of diet. On the one hand, we have Sir Henry Thompson’s assertion that flesh meat, though confessedly unnecessary, may at times, and in smaller measure, be desirable ; on the other hand, we have to weigh well the fact (unnoticed by Sir Henry Thompson) that flesh-food is ﬁve or six times as expensive as vegetable substance; that the institution of the slaughter-house entails cruel sufferings on millions upon millions of innocent animals ; and that our tables are thereby supplied with a far less appetising and agreeable form of food than that which good taste would bid us desire. Surely, under these conditions of choice, “Vegetarianism,” “Food Reform,” “Akreophagy”—whatever we like to call it—is worthy of a far more earnest trial than even the most advanced member of the medical profession seems at present willing to allow it.