h
it. The wit of man can find no argument which justifies its punishment."

"Don't be too sure of that," I retorted.

"I have never heard a convincing argument which condemns it, Frank; I do
not believe such a reason exists."

"Don't forget," I said, "that this practice which you defend is
condemned by a hundred generations of the most civilised races of
mankind."

"Mere prejudice of the unlettered, Frank."

"And what is such a prejudice?" I asked. "It is the reason of a thousand
generations of men, a reason so sanctified by secular experience that it
has passed into flesh and blood and become an emotion and is no longer
merely an argument. I would rather have one such prejudice held by men
of a dozen different races than a myriad reasons. Such a prejudice is
incarnate reason approved by immemorial experience.

"What argument have you against cannibalism; what reason is there why we
should not fatten babies for the spit and eat their flesh? The flesh is
sweeter, African travellers tell us, than any other meat, tenderer at
once and more sustaining; all reasons are in favour of it. What hinders
us from indulging in this appetite but prejudice, sacred prejudice, an
instinctive loathing at the bare idea?

"Humanity, it seems to me, is toiling up a long slope leading from the
brute to the god: again and again whole generations, sometimes whole
races, have fallen back and disappeared in the abyss. Every slip fills
the survivors with fear and horror which with ages have become
instinctive, and now you appear and laugh at their fears and tell them
that human flesh is excellent food, and that sterile kisses are the
noblest form of passion. They shudder from you and hate and punish you,
and if you persist they will kill you. Who shall say they are wrong? Who
shall sneer at their instinctive repulsion hallowed by ages of
successful endeavour?"

"Fine rhetoric, I concede," he replied, "but mere rhetoric. I never
heard such a defence of prejudice before. I should not have expected it
from you. You admit you don't share the prejudice; you don't feel the
horror, the instinctive loathing you describe. Why? Because you are
educated, Frank, because you know that the passion Socrates felt was not
a low passion, because you know that Caesar's weakness, let us say, or
the weakness of Michelangelo or of Shakespeare, is not despicable. If
the desire is not a characteristic of the highest humanity, at least it
is consistent with it."