When, further, it is revealed in the popular literature, as well as in the scientific books and journals of this nineteenth century, that the innocent victims of the luxurious gluttony of the richer classes in all communities, subjected as they were to every conceivable kind of brutal atrocity, were yet, by the science of the time, acknowledged, without controversy, to be beings essentially of the same physical and mental organisation with their human devourers; to be as susceptible to physical suffering and pain as they; to be endowed--at all events, a very large proportion of them--with reasoning and mental faculties in very high degrees, and far from destitute of moral perceptions, the amazement may well be conjectured to give way to incredulity, that such knowledge and such practices could possibly co-exist. That the outward signs of all this gross barbarism--the entire or mangled bodies of the victims of the Table--were accustomed to be put up for public exhibition in every street and thoroughfare, without manifestations of disgust or abhorrence from the passers-by--even from those pretending to most culture or fashion--such outward proofs of extraordinary insensibility on the part of all classes to finer feeling may, nevertheless, scarcely provoke so much astonishment from an enlightened posterity as the fact that every public gathering of the governors or civil dignitaries of the country; every celebration of ecclesiastical or religious festivals appeared to be made the special occasion of the sacrifice and suffering of a greater number and variety than usual of their harmless fellow-beings; and all this often in the near neighbourhood of starving thousands, starving from want of the merest necessaries of life. Happily, however, there will be visible to the philosopher of the Future signs of the dawn of the better day in this last quarter of the nineteenth century. He will find, in the midst of the general barbarism of life, and in spite of the prevailing indifferentism and infidelity to truth, that there was a gradually increasing number of dissenters and protesters; that already, at the beginning of that period, there were associations of dietary reformers--offshoots from the English parent society, founded in 1847--successively established in America, in Germany, in Switzerland, in France, and, finally, in Italy; small indeed in numbers, but strenuous in efforts to spread their principles and practice; that in some of the larger cities, both in this country and in other parts of Europe, there had also been set on foot _Reformed Restaurants_, which supplied to considerable numbers of persons at once better food and better knowledge.