as they have
retained the more natural dietetic habits to which I have alluded; and
that they have been unhappy or short-lived, as nations, in proportion as
exciting food and drink have been used? Is it not true, that those
individuals, families, tribes, and nations, which have used what I call
excitements, liquid or solid, have been subjected by them to the same
effects which follow the use of spirits--first, invigoration, and
subsequently decline, and ultimately a loss of strength? Why is it that
the more wealthy, all over Europe, who get flesh more or less,
deteriorate in their families so rapidly? Why is it that every thing is,
in this respect, so stationary among the middle classes and the poor?

In short--for the case appears to me a plain one--it is the simple
habits of some, whether we speak of nations, families, or individuals,
which have preserved the world from going to utter decay. In ancient
times, the Egyptians, the most enlightened and one of the most enduring
of nations, were what might properly be called a vegetable-eating
nation; so were the ancient Persians, in the days of their greatest
glory; so the Essenes, among the Jews; so the Romans, as I have said
elsewhere, and the Greeks. If either Moses or Herodotus is to be
credited, men lived, in ancient times, about a thousand years. Indeed,
empire seems to have departed from among the ancient nations precisely
when simplicity departed. So it is with nations still. A flesh-eating
nation may retain the supremacy of the world a short time, as several
European and American nations have done; just as the laborer, whose
brain and nerves are stimulated by ardent spirits, may for a time
retain--through the medium of an artificial strength--the ascendency
among his fellow-laborers; but the triumph of both the nation and the
individual must be short, and the debility which follows proportionable.
And if the United States, as a nation, seem to form an exception to the
truth of this remark, it is only because the stage of debility has not
yet arrived. Let us be patient, however, for it is not far off.

But to come to the specification of facts. The Japanese of the interior,
according to some of the British geographers, live principally on rice
and fruits--a single handful of rice often forming the basis of their
frugal meal. Flesh, it is said, they either cannot get, or do not like;
and to milk, even, they have the same sort of aversion which most of us
have to b