But it is when we turn from philanthropy to zoophily, and to the questions more particularly affecting the welfare of animals, that the importance of vegetarianism, in spite of the stubborn attempts of the old-fashioned "animal lovers" to overlook it, is most marked. Here, again, I do not share the extreme vegetarian view that food reform is the _foundation_ of other reforms, for I think it can be shown that all cruelties to animals, whether inflicted in the interests of the dinner-table, the laboratory, the hunting-field, or any other institution, are the outcome of one and the same error—the blindness which can see no unity and kinship, but only difference and division, between the human and the non-human race. This blindness it is—this crass denial of a common origin, a common nature, a common structure, and common pleasures and pains—that has alone hardened men in all ages of the world, civilised or barbarous, to inflict such fiendish outrages on their harmless fellow-beings; and to remove this blindness we need, it seems to me, a deeper and more radical remedy than the reform of sport, or of physiological methods, or even of diet alone. The only real cure for the evil is the growing sense that the lower animals are closely akin to us, and have rights. And here we see the inevitable logic of vegetarianism, if our belief in the rights of animals is ever to quit the stage of theory and enter the stage of fact; for just as there can be no human rights where there is slavery, so there can be no animal rights where there is eating of flesh. "To keep a man, slave or servant," says Edward Carpenter, "for your own advantage merely, to keep an animal that you may _eat_ it, is a lie; you cannot look that man or animal in the face." I am not saying that it is not a good thing that, quite apart from food reform, anti-vivisectionists should be denouncing the doings of "the scientific inquisition," while humanitarians of another school are exposing the horrors of sport, for cruelty is a many-headed monster, and there must at times be a concentration of energy on a particular spot; but I do say that any reasoned principle of kindness to animals which leaves vegetarianism outside its scope is, in the very nature of things, foredoomed to failure.[58] Footnote 58: Take, for example, the rule to which some bird-lovers bind themselves, to wear no feathers but those of birds killed for food. One is reminded of Thomas Paine's epigram: "They pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird."