No More Learning

But the use of animal flesh and fermented liquors
directly militates with this equality of the rights of man. The peasant
cannot gratify these fashionable cravings without leaving his family to
starve. Without disease and war, those sweeping curtailers of
population, pasturage would include a waste too great to be afforded.
The labour requisite to support a family is far lighter' than is usually
supposed. (It has come under the author's experience that some of the
workmen on an embankment in North Wales, who, in consequence of the
inability of the proprietor to pay them, seldom received their wages,
have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile
ground by moonlight. In the notes to Pratt's poem, "Bread, or the Poor",
is an account of an industrious labourer who, by working in a small
garden, before and after his day's task, attained to an enviable state
of independence. ) The peasantry work, not only for themselves, but for
the aristocracy, the army, and the manufacturers.

The advantage of a reform in diet is obviously greater than that of any
other. It strikes at the root of the evil. To remedy the abuses of
legislation, before we annihilate the propensities by which they are
produced, is to suppose that by taking away the effect the cause will
cease to operate. But the efficacy of this system depends entirely on
the proselytism of individuals, and grounds its merits, as a benefit to
the community, upon the total change of the dietetic habits in its
members. It proceeds securely from a number of particular cases to one
that is universal, and has this advantage over the contrary mode, that
one error does not invalidate all that has gone before.

Let not too much, however, be expected from this system. The healthiest
among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical,
athletic, and longlived is a being inexpressibly inferior to what he
would have been, had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors
accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity.
In the
most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting
by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then,
instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking
root in the silence of innumerable ages? --Indubitably not. All that I
contend for is, that from the moment of the relinquishing all unnatural
habits no new disease is generated; and that the predisposition to
hereditary maladies gradually perishes, for want of its accustomed
supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula,
such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water.

Those who may be induced by these remarks to give the vegetable system a
fair trial, should, in the first place, date the commencement of their
practice from the moment of their conviction. All depends upon breaking
through a pernicious habit resolutely and at once. Dr. Trotter asserts
that no drunkard was ever reformed by gradually relinquishing his dram.
(See Trotter on the Nervous Temperament. ) Animal flesh, in its effects
on the human stomach, is analogous to a dram. It is similar in the kind,
though differing in the degree, of its operation. The proselyte to a
pure diet must be warned to expect a temporary diminution of muscular
strength. The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account
for this event. But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable
capability for exertion, far surpassing his former various and
fluctuating strength. Above all, he will acquire an easiness of
breathing, by which such exertion is performed, with a remarkable
exemption from that painful and difficult panting now felt by almost
every one after hastily climbing an ordinary mountain.