I want to remind you and warn you that it makes no difference how just a proposition may be and how universally and unreservedly it may be ultimately accepted, its beginning is always a period of interrogation and war. When Garrison first announced the proposition denying the right to auction Ethiopians, the proposition was assailed by the most formidable volleys of objection. Those objections seem puerile today, but in the days in which this proposition found few heads in which to hide, they were axioms of ethical and political science. So when you take an attitude on this proposition _remember_ there are future generations as well as this one, and _be careful_ that you do not make the same spectacle of yourself that poor old Webster and other blind men made when they poured cold water down the spines of early Abolitionists. I became a vegetarian by my own reflection. I did not know at the time of the vegetarian movement, and, hence supposed myself alone among republics of carnivora. It did not seem to me graceful or ideal that I, an ethical being, should maintain my existence at the incessant expense of misery and death to others. But the problem that for some time tormented me was whether it were possible to keep up a successful and at all interesting existence without ox-hips. I wondered whether the universe were so constructed that it were impossible for its most endowed children to live without the crudest and most recreant egoism. There is now no remnant of a doubt about the possibilities of a bloodless existence, nor even of its positive hygienic advantages. I had been considerable of a vulture, and for sometime after eliminating flesh from my menus I had desire for it. But gradually that desire faded, and there came in its stead a growing horror of flesh. The grinding of the tissues of my fellow beings seemed horribly akin to the chewing of the emotions of my friends. After a few weeks of fruits and vegetables there came over me a feeling of exultation and superiority and crispness that was truly novel. Today, I am thoroughly emancipated from the coils of kreophagy. I shall go down to my grave and out into the darkling hereafter with a bloodless digestion, if I am the only animal in the universe to do so. The flesh-tearing performances which I am compelled everywhere to behold seem to me to be the lurid deeds of maniacs rather than the timed and premeditated acts of sane beings. And I can but pity, not only the creatures whose throats are severed and whose skeletons are stripped, but the blind and reckless cannibals who perpetrate these crimes. When the whole earth teems with such a bewildering variety of beautiful and bloodless fruits, it seems so strange and so sad and so frightful that man should continue the barbarous, blood-sucking practices of the world’s infancy.