The tyranny of the belly turns the world into a robber's cave. Eating means killing. Distilled in the alembic of the stomach, the life destroyed by slaughter becomes so much fresh life. Everything is melted down again, everything has a fresh beginning in death's insatiable furnace. Man, from the alimentary point of view, is the chief brigand, consuming everything that lives or might live. Here is a mouthful of bread, the sacred food. It represents a certain number of grains of wheat which asked only to sprout, to turn green in the sun, to shoot up into tall stalks crowned with ears. They died that we might live. Here are some eggs. Left undisturbed with the Hen, they would have emitted the Chickens' gentle cheep. They died that we might live. Here is beef, mutton, poultry. Horror, it smells of blood, it is eloquent of murder! If we gave it a thought, we should not dare to sit down to table, that altar of cruel sacrifices. How many lives does the Swallow, to mention only the most peaceable, harvest in the course of a single day! From morning to evening he gulps down Crane-flies, Gnats and Midges joyously dancing in the sunbeams. Quick as lightning he passes; and the dancers are decimated. They perish; then their melancholy remnants fall from the nest containing the young brood, in the form of guano which becomes the turf's inheritance. And so it is with all and everything, with large and small, from end to end of the animal progression. A perpetual massacre perpetuates the flux of life. Appalled by these butcheries, the thinker begins to dream of a state of affairs which would free us from the horrors of the maw. This ideal of innocence, as our poor nature vaguely sees it, is not an impossibility; it is partly realized for all of us, men and animals. Breathing is the most imperious of needs. We live by the air before we live by bread; and this happens of itself, without painful struggles, without costly labour, almost without our knowledge. We do not set out, armed for war, to conquer the air by rapine, violence, cunning, barter and desperate labour; the supreme element of life enters our bodies of its own accord; it penetrates us and quickens us. Each of us has his generous share of it without giving the matter a thought. To crown perfection, it is free. And this will last indefinitely until an ever ingenious Treasury invents distributing-taps and pneumatic receivers from which the air will be doled out to us at so much a piston-stroke. Let us hope that we shall be spared this particular item of scientific progress, for that, woe betide us, would be the end of all things: the tax would kill the tax-payer! Chemistry, in its lighter moods, promises us, in the future, pills containing the concentrated essence of food. These cunning compounds, the product of our laboratories, would not end our longing to possess a stomach no more burdensome than our lungs and to feed even as we breathe.