It will be said, perhaps, the vegetable-eating Europeans are not always
distinguished for vigorous minds. True; but this, it may be maintained,
arises from their degraded physical condition, generally; and that
neglect of mental and moral cultivation which accompanies it. A few,
even here, like comets in the material system, have occasionally broken
out, and emitted no faint light in the sphere in which they were
destined to move.

But we are not confined to Europe. The South Sea Islanders, in many
instances, feed almost wholly on vegetable substances; yet their agility
and strength are so great, that it is said "the stoutest and most expert
English sailors, had no chance with them in wrestling and boxing."

We come, lastly, to Africa, the greater part of whose millions feed on
rice, dates, etc.; yet their bodily powers are well known.

In short, more than half of the 800,000,000 of human beings which
inhabit our globe live on vegetables; or, if they get meat at all, it is
so rarely that it can hardly have any effect on their structure or
character. Out of Europe and the United States--I might even say, out of
the latter--the use of animal food is either confined to a few meagre,
weak, timid nations, like the Esquimaux, the Greenlanders, the
Laplanders, the Samoiedes, the Kamtschadales, the Ostiacs, and the
natives of Siberia and Terra del Fuego; or those wealthier classes, or
individuals of every country, who are able to range lawlessly over the
Creator's domains, and select, for their tables, whatever fancy or
fashion, or a capricious appetite may dictate, or physical power afford
them.

VII. THE MORAL ARGUMENT.

In one point of view, nearly every argument which can be brought to show
the superiority of a vegetable diet over one that includes flesh or
fish, is a moral argument.

Thus, if man is so constituted by his structure, and by the laws of his
animal economy, that all the functions of the body, and of course all
the faculties of the mind, and the affections of the soul, are in better
condition--better subserve our own purposes, and the purposes of the
great Creator--as well as hold out longer, on the vegetable system--then
is it desirable, in a moral point of view, to adopt it. If mankind lose,
upon the average, about two years of their lives by sickness, as some
have estimated it,[24] saying nothing of the pain and suffering
undergone, or of the mental anguish and soul torment which grow out of
it,