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 applied to less fashionable abodes of evil, is suggestive of flesh-pots; but I am inclined to think that these apparent links between meat-eating and sin are accidental, and that the only wrong of that practice is the direct one of unnatural cruelty and unhygienic and unaesthetic taste. But surely this is enough.

To inflict useless pain, as in the butcher's trade—actually to take pleasure in it, as in the sportsman's—these are clearly inhuman and inhumane habits, the survivals of barbarous ages. It is a superstition, a fetish, that makes us continue such savage customs, just as slavery and the stake and instruments of torture survived long after men should have known better. Every age before us has had its barbarisms—we admit that—and we may be pretty sure that our age has its barbarisms too; and if so, is there one more evident, one which has less to say for itself, than this habit of eating flesh and blood? And from every point of view the lines of reform converge upon a non-flesh diet: from the point of view of health, cleanliness, and an undefiled instinct; from the point of view of humanity and kindness to our animal kin; from the point of view of the artist and votary of beauty; from the point of view of the economist, who fears the pressure of population upon subsistence.

There is a profound philosophy in the suggested change, too. It is no materialistic move, prompted by a sentimental dislike of death and its accompaniments. It is rather the recognition of the relationship between man and all that lives and suffers and feels—a reassertion of the obligation of love to neighbour, with that term extended to take in all the sentient creation. Two thousand years ago, in answer to the question "Who is my neighbour?" the beautiful parable of the Good Samaritan was told, to show that a despised foreigner and heretic was also a brother. You may remember that this philanthropic man, so much kinder than priest and Levite, dressed the wounds of the highwayman's victim, set him on his "beast," brought him to an