ding the force of this argument, except by denying
the premises on which I have founded my conclusions. But they are far
more easily denied than disproved. The probability, after all, is, that
my estimates are too low, and that the advantages of an exclusively
vegetable diet, in a national or political point of view, are even
greater than is here represented. I do not deny, that some deduction
ought to be made on account of the consumption of fish, which does not
prevent the growth or use of vegetable products; but my belief is, that,
including them, the animal food we use amounts to a great deal more than
one meal a day, or one third of our whole living.

Suppose there was no _crime_ in shutting human beings out of existence
by flesh-eating, at the amazing rate I have mentioned--still, is it not,
I repeat it, a great national or political loss? Or, will it be said, in
its defence, as has been said in defence of war, if not of intemperance
and some of the forms of licentiousness, that as the world is, it is a
blessing to keep down its population, otherwise it would soon be
overstocked? The argument would be as good in one case as in the other;
that is, it is not valid in either. The world might be made to sustain,
in comfort, even in the present comparatively infant state of the arts
and sciences, at least forty or fifty times its present number of
inhabitants. It will be time enough a thousand or two thousand years to
come, to begin to talk about the danger of the world's being
over-peopled; and, above all, to talk about justifying what we know is,
in the abstract, very wrong, to prevent a distant imagined evil; one, in
fact, which may not, and probably will not ever exist.

V. THE ECONOMICAL ARGUMENT.

The economy of the vegetable system is so intimately connected with its
political or national advantages; that is, so depends on, or grows out
of them, that I hesitated for some time before I decided to consider it
separately. Whatever is shown clearly to be for the general good policy
and well-being of society, cannot be prejudicial to the best interests
of the individuals who compose that society. Still, there are some minor
considerations that I wish to present under this head, that could not
so well have been introduced any where else.

There is, indeed, one reason for omitting wholly the consideration of
the pecuniary advantages of the system which I am attempting to defend.
The public, to some extent, at once