It is impossible that any discussion of the principle of animals’ rights can be at all adequate or conclusive which ignores, as many so-called humanitarians still ignore, the immense underlying importance of the food question. The origin of the habit of flesh-eating need not greatly concern us; let us assume, in accordance with the most favoured theory, that animals were first slaughtered by the uncivilized migratory tribes under the stress of want, and that the practice thus engendered, being fostered by the religious idea of blood-offering and propitiation, survived and increased after the early conditions which produced it had passed away. What is more important to note, is that the very prevalence of the habit has caused it to be regarded as a necessary feature of modern civilization, and that this view has inevitably had a marked effect, and a very detrimental effect, on the study of man’s moral relation to the lower animals. Now it must be admitted, I think, that it is a difficult thing consistently to recognize or assert the rights of an animal on whom you purpose to make a meal, a difficulty which has not been at all satisfactorily surmounted by those moralists who, while accepting the practice of flesh-eating as an institution which is itself beyond cavil, have nevertheless been anxious to find some solid basis for a theory of humaneness. “Strange contrariety of conduct,” says Goldsmith’s “Chinese Philosopher,” in commenting on this dilemma; “they pity, and they _eat_ the objects of their compassion!” There is also the further consideration that the sanction implicitly given to the terrible cruelties inflicted on harmless cattle by the drover and the slaughterman render it, by parity of reasoning, wellnigh impossible to abolish many other acts of injustice that we see everywhere around us; and this obstacle the opponents of humanitarian reform have not been slow to utilize. Hence a disposition on the part of many humane writers to fight shy of the awkward subject of the slaughter-house, or to gloss it over with a series of contradictory and quite irrelevant excuses. Let me give a few examples. “We deprive animals of life,” says Bentham, in a delightfully naïve application of the utilitarian philosophy, “and this is justifiable; their pains do not equal our enjoyments.” “By the scheme of universal providence,” says Lawrence, “the services between man and beast are intended to be reciprocal, and the greater part of the latter can by no other means requite human labour and care than by the forfeiture of life.” Schopenhauer’s plea is somewhat similar to the foregoing: “Man deprived of all flesh-food, especially in the north, would suffer more than the animal suffers in a swift and unforeseen death; still we ought to mitigate it by the help of chloroform.” Then there is the argument so frequently founded on the supposed sanction of Nature.