Wiser than ourselves, the ideal people do not waste their corn in the manufacture of alcoholic drinks:-- “They sow corn only for bread. For their drink is either wine made of grapes, or else of apples or pears, or else it is clear water--and many times mead made of honey or liquorice sodden in water, for of that they have great store.” The selfish policy of converting arable into grazing land is emphatically denounced by More:-- “They (the oxen and sheep) consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities. For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore the dearest wool. There noblemen and gentlemen, yea, and certain abbots, holy men no doubt, not contenting themselves with the yearly revenues and profits that were wont to grow to their forefathers and predecessors of their lands, nor being content that they live in rest and pleasure nothing profiting, yea, much annoying, the public weal, leave no land for tillage--they enclose all into pasture, they throw down houses, they pluck down towns and leave nothing standing, but only the church to be made a sheep house; and, as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands, and parks, those good holy men turn dwelling-places and all glebe land into wilderness and desolation.... For one shepherd or herdsman is enough to eat up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof about husbandry many hands would be requisite. And this is also the cause why victuals be now in many places dearer; yea, besides this, the price of wool is so risen that poor folks, which were wont to work it and make cloth thereof, be now able to buy none at all, and by this means very many be forced to forsake work and to give themselves to idleness. For after that so much land was enclosed for pasture, an infinite multitude of sheep died of the rot, such vengeance God took of their inordinate and insatiable covetousness, sending among the sheep that pestiferous murrain which much more justly should have fallen on the sheep-masters’ own heads; and though the number of sheep increase never so fast, yet the price falleth not one mite, because there be so few sellers,” &c. These sagacious and just reflections upon the evil social consequences of carnivorousness may be fitly commended to the earnest attention of our public writers and speakers of to-day. The periodical cattle plagues and foot-and-mouth diseases, which, in theological language, are vaguely assigned to national sins, might be more ingenuously and truthfully attributed to the one sufficient cause--to the general indulgence of selfish instincts, which closes the ear to all the promptings at once of humanity and of reason, and is, in truth, a national sin of the most serious character.[108]