“It is thus that many Europeans, whom their destiny conducts to the cannibal countries, after some months of sojourn with the natives, make no difficulty of seating themselves at their banquet, and of sharing their horrible repast, which at first had excited their horror and disgust. They begin with devouring a dog: from the dog to the man the space is soon cleared. “Men believe themselves to be just, provided that they fulfil, in regard to their fellows, the duties which have been prescribed to them. But it is goodness which is the justice of man; and it is impossible, I repeat it, to be good towards one’s fellow without being so towards other existences. Let us not be the dupes of _appearances_. Seneca, who lived only on the herbs of his garden, to which he owed those last gleams of philosophy which enlightened, so to speak, the fall of the Roman Empire, also thinks that crime cannot be circumscribed: _Nullum intrà se manet vitium_. And if, as Ovid affirms, the sword struck men only after having been first dyed in the blood of the lower animals, what interest have we not in respecting such a barrier? Like Æolus, who held in his hands the bag in which the winds were confined, we may at our will, according as we live upon plants or upon animals, tranquillize the earth or excite terrible tempests upon it. “I am too well aware that a subterfuge will be found in excusing the crime by necessity, and calumniating Providence. According to the pretended belief of the greatest number of people, if other animals were not put to death, they would deprive men of the empire of the earth. But it is easy to reply to this objection by the examples of people who, holding in horror the effusion of blood, and robbing no being of life--even the vilest or most hateful--are by no means disturbed in the exercise of their sovereignty.[228] And it would result from the examples of these people, if one had not other proofs besides, that man is absolutely master of the means of increasing or limiting the multiplication of the species which are more or less in dependence upon him. And it is not less evident that the earth, in this latter hypothesis, would support an infinitely greater number of the human species. Thus will the vegetable regimen be _necessarily_ adopted one day over the whole earth, when the multiplication of our species shall have reached a certain number fixed and pre-established by that imperious and irrevocable law which is intimately connected, for the most part, with humanity, justice, and virtue--the number at which it is slowly arriving, arrested by the very causes which I am striving to destroy, and which, for that single reason, ought to arm against them all generous beings who appreciate the benefit of existence.”[229]