But it is superfluous to spend time in answering such questions, for their silliness is far in excess of their honesty. For years the opponents of vegetarianism in the press had been asking, "What should we do without leather?" etc.; yet as soon as the substitutes for these articles began to be exhibited at the annual Vegetarian Congress, the note was changed, and the reporters remarked that the exhibition was "not of much interest," until we found the London correspondent of a big provincial paper actually complaining that "the crusade against meat of every kind, _and even against leather_ (at this exhibition they have boots and shoes made of imitation leather), is carrying the reform a little too far." Our critics are hard to satisfy. We are going "a little too far" if we produce a substitute for leather; if we do not produce one, we are not going far enough. And now, with all becoming gravity, we turn to the second branch of our subject—the disinterested inquiry as to "what would become of the animals" if we ceased to kill them for food. "If the life of animals," says Dr. Paul Carus, "had to be regarded as sacred as human life, there can be no doubt about it that whole industries would be destroyed, and human civilisation would at once drop down to a very primitive condition. Many millions would starve, and large cities would disappear from the face of the earth. But the brute creation would suffer too. There might be a temporary increase of brute life, but certainly not of happiness. Cattle would only be raised for draught-oxen and milk-kine, and they would not die the sudden death at the hands of the butcher, but slowly of old age or by disease."[46] Footnote 46: "The Open Court," 1898. A pathetic picture, indeed! It does not for a moment occur to this sapient prophet of disaster that the adoption of vegetarianism will necessarily be gradual, and further that vegetarians do _not_ hold the life of animals to be "as sacred as human life." To critics who do not even ascertain what the system means before they reject it, and who ignore all consideration of the degrees and relative sacredness of the various forms of life, vegetarianism must naturally seem to be a confused jumble of thought—the confusion, in reality, being altogether on their own side. ALARMIST: There is another aspect of this question, and a very grave one. If flesh-eating were abolished, what would become of the animals? VEGETARIAN: Yes, let us talk about that fearful contingency. You think they would be thrown out of employment, so to speak—would find their careers cut short, or rather left long? ALARMIST: It is no joking matter. Would they not run wild in ever-increasing numbers, and perhaps overrun the land, or, if food failed them, lie dead and dying about our roadways and suburbs?