I am a vegetarian because I believe in justice. There is injustice in the universe, because there are beings in it who monopolize its sweets and opportunities. They want their own pleasures and also the pleasures of others. They shuffle upon others their bitters, and at the same time rob them of their sweets. Others live, not as ends, but as means and conveniences. I do not eat my fellow creatures, for the same reason I do not enslave my brother and treat my sister as an appendage and otherwise monopolize the sweets and opportunities of the planet. There are on this ball billions of beings. They are my fellow creatures. So far as I can make out they have approximately the same right to existence and to the enjoyment of existence as I have. I do not want their pleasures and I do not want them to drink my sorrows. I want simply my own and I am perfectly content to rob no one. In the words of another, “I never want happiness that gives another pain. I wish not happiness from others—only happiness out of the bosom of the great ALL which comes like the red flowers of the oleander.” I am a vegetarian because it is logical and natural to be so. The vegetable world contains all the elements necessary to human sustenance, and in a much more prime condition than they are found in the diseased tissues of our mistreated servants. The belief that we can not have peach in our dimples and diamonds in our brains without dead bodies in our digestion is a belief having no foundation except ignorance. Vegetal fibrin is identical with animal fibrin, and vegetal albumen is identical with animal albumen. Even in albuminoids, in the supply of which meat is supposed to be rather exclusive, there are vegetables, nuts and grains that far exceed chops and steaks. Fish, for instance, contains about 13 per cent. of albuminoids, pork on average 16 per cent., and beef 17½ per cent.; while nuts furnish from 8 to 25 per cent., grains 7 to 15 per cent., eggs 14 per cent., cheese 29 per cent., peas 22 per cent., lentils 25 per cent., and beans from 22 to 35 per cent. The vegetable world, in fact, is the natural storehouse and the only original storehouse from which animals may derive energy. No animal can produce protoplasm, which is the basis of all life and energy. This is a function of the plant, and of the plant only. All an animal can do is to take it after it is produced and burn it up. Animals are simply locomotives consuming the energy which plants slowly accumulate from the sun. It is a graceful and perfect process—plants storing up energy from the soil and sun, the inorganic, and the animal using this energy and completing the circle by sending the elements back again to the inorganic. And it is a “barbarism” in nature for animals to violate this beautiful arrangement by turning around and swallowing each other.