ce to
vegetarianism, a very much more numerous peasantry would be required on
the land. This would be physically, economically, morally, better for
the nation. It is obvious that national health would be improved with a
considerably larger proportion of hardy country yeomen. The percentage
of poor and unemployed people in large cities would be reduced, their
labor being required on the soil, where, being in more natural,
salutary, harmonious surroundings the moral element would have better
opportunity for development than when confined in the unhealthy, ugly,
squalid surroundings of a city slum.

It is not generally known that there is often a decided _loss_ of
valuable food-material in feeding animals for food, one authority
stating that it takes nearly 4 lbs. of barley, which is a good wholesome
food, to make 1 lb. of pork, a food that can hardly be considered safe
to eat when we learn that tuberculosis was detected in 6,393 pigs in
Berlin abattoirs in one year.

As to the comparative cost of a vegetarian and omnivorous diet, it is
instructive to learn that it is proverbial in the Western States of
America that a Chinaman can live and support his family in health and
comfort on an allowance which to a meat-eating white man would be
starvation. It is not to be denied that a vegetarian desirous of living
to eat, and having no reason or desire to be economical, could spend
money as extravagantly as a devotee of the flesh-pots having a similar
disposition. But it is significant that the poor of most European
countries are not vegetarians from choice but from necessity. Had they
the means doubtless they would purchase meat, not because of any
instinctive liking for it, but because of that almost universal trait of
human character that causes men to desire to imitate their superiors,
without, in most cases, any due consideration as to whether the supposed
superiors are worthy of the genuflection they get. Were King George or
Kaiser Wilhelm to become vegetarians and advocate the non-flesh diet,
such an occurrence would do far more towards advancing the popularity of
this diet than a thousand lectures from "mere" men of science. Carlyle
was not far wrong when he called men "clothes worshippers." The
uneducated and poor imitate the educated and rich, not because they
possess that attitude of mind which owes its existence to a very deep
and subtle emotion and which is expressed in worship and veneration for
power, whether it