VEGETARIAN: Before I relieve your anxiety on this point, may I just remark that this second difficulty seems to counterbalance the former one? If every suburban householder is likely to have a dead ox against his garden-gate, we evidently need not fear the failure of the leather and tallow trade. But once again you are mistaken. You have overlooked the fact that the breeding of animals is not free and unrestricted, but is kept within certain limits, and carefully regulated by man; so that if the demand for butchers' meat should gradually decline, there would be no more alarming result than a corresponding gradual decline in the supply from the breeder. ALARMIST: Well, I don't know. I sadly doubt whether things would balance themselves so comfortably. VEGETARIAN: Ah, you think that some neglected old porker, like Scott's "Last Minstrel," would be left out in the cold. "For, well-a-day! their date was fled, His tuneful brethren all were dead; And he, neglected and oppressed, Longed to be with them and at rest." But no; for look at the case of the donkey. We do not (knowingly) eat donkeys, yet a dead donkey is proverbially a rare sight. Nor are we overrun with donkeys—at least, not in the sense referred to. ALARMIST: Yet I understand that in India, where there is a reluctance to kill animals, they are often in wretched plight. _Vegetarian_: True; but we were talking not of _killing_ animals but of _eating_ them. Vegetarianism is not Brahminism; we would kill when necessary, whether for our own sake or the animals', but we would not breed them in vast numbers in order to kill, nor kill them in order to eat. Surely the distinction is a clear one? The attitude of vegetarians towards this subject is indeed plain enough for those who wish to understand it. Regarding the slaughter of animals for food as cruel and unnecessary, they advocate its discontinuance (a process which, if it comes about at all, will, as I have shown, be a gradual one, and will at no point cause any sudden disruption of existing conditions), but this does not commit them to the absurd belief that animal life, in all its various grades, is absolutely sacred and inviolable. Must we not suspect that the apologists of flesh-eating who make these childish alarums and excursions are fain to do so from some inner conviction of the weakness of their own case? BIBLE AND BEEF