Of the many practical witnesses of this period, more or less interesting, for the sufficiency, or rather superiority, of the reformed regimen, four names stand out in prominent relief--Franklin, Howard, Swedenborg, Wesley--prominent either for scientific ability or for philanthropic zeal. To his early resolution to betake himself to frugal living, Benjamin Franklin, then in a printer’s office in Boston, attributes mainly his future success in life.[195] It was to his pure dietary that the great Prison Reformer assigns his immunity, during so many years, from the deadly jail-fever, to the infection of which he fearlessly exposed himself in visiting those hotbeds of _malaria_--the filthy prisons of this country and of continental Europe. (See the correspondence of John Howard--_passim_.) Equally significant is the testimony of the eminent founder of Methodism whose almost unexampled energy and endurance, both of mind and body, during some fifty years of continuous persecution, both legal and popular, were supported (as he informs us in his _Journals_) mainly by abstinence from gross foods; while, in regard to Emanuel Swedenborg, if abstinence does not assume so prominent a place in his theological or other various writings as might have been expected from his special opinions, the cause of such silence must be referred not to personal addiction to an _anti-spiritualistic_ nourishment (for he himself was notably frugal) but to preoccupation of mental faculties which seem to have been absorbed in the elaboration of his well-known spiritualistic system. The limits of this work do not permit us to quote all the many writers of the eighteenth century whom philosophy, science, or profounder feeling urged _incidentally_ to question the necessity or to suspect the barbarism of the Slaughter-House. But there are two names, amongst the highest in the whole range of English philosophic literature, whose expression of opinion may seem to be peculiarly noteworthy--the author of the _Wealth of Nations_ and the historian of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. “It may, indeed, be doubted [writes the founder of the science of Political Economy] whether butchers’ meat is _anywhere_ a necessary of life. Grain and other vegetables, with the help of milk, cheese, and butter, or oil (where butter is not to be had), it is known from experience, can, _without any butchers’ meat, afford the most plentiful, the most wholesome, the most nourishing, and the most invigorating diet_.”[196] As for the reflections of the first of historians, who seems always carefully to guard himself from the expression of any sort of emotion not in keeping with the character of an impartial judge and unprejudiced spectator, but who, on the subject in question, cannot wholly repress the _natural_ feeling of disgust, they are sufficiently significant. Gibbon is describing the manners of the Tartar tribes:--