VEGETARIAN: But, happily, your lurid picture is based on the false assumption that vegetarianism would come about by a sudden and instantaneous conversion. That is not the way in which great changes are accomplished. They are a matter of years and centuries, not of days and weeks; and the "fine morning" you spoke of will be a gradual morning of very extensive duration. ALARMIST: Well, but that is only putting off the evil day—it would come at last. VEGETARIAN: But would not something else have also been coming meantime? Would not the demand, in this as in all other usages of life, have produced the corresponding supply? There is no need, however, to speculate as to what _would_ happen, because it is happening already. ALARMIST: What is happening? VEGETARIAN: The articles which you named are being supplied in substitutes from the vegetable kingdom. Slowly and tentatively at first, as is inevitable while vegetarians are so few in numbers; but vegetarian boots, vegetarian soap, and vegetarian candles are now in the market, and as the movement spreads, the demand will be proportionately greater. So pray do not alarm yourself about the dislocation of trade, for the whole change, great as it is, will come to pass imperceptibly, and will never bring a moment's inconvenience to anyone. Mankind, as it happens, is not so helpless, so uninventive, so literally "hidebound," as to let its progress be dependent on skins, bones, and guts. There is a good deal of unintended humour, too, in some of the difficulties that are alleged. Thus, vegetarians are often asked how the land could be fertilised without the use of animal manure, it being apparently forgotten that _ex nihilo nihil fit_, and that animals can only return to the land in manure what they have previously taken from it in food; also that by our absurdly wasteful drainage system we are all the time poisoning our seas and rivers with a mass of sewage which would be amply sufficient for the soil. "Let the land," says Mr. William Hoyle, "only receive, in the shape of manure, the sewage and refuse from the teeming population of our towns and villages, in addition to the other means which are applied to it, and let it be properly drained and cultivated, and there is hardly any limit to its power of production."[45] Footnote 45: "Our National Resources," 1889.