and its products and eggs"—if, I say, we cannot satisfy his curiosity on this head, it is because our Society formally, from the first, proclaimed its neutrality with regard to such substances, making war in its corporate capacity solely on fish, flesh, and fowl. Among the Danielite Order Sir Henry will find what his soul longs for in the Garden of Eden.
II. If we are inconsistent, Pythagoras and Musonius, to whom one may add the Brahmins and most Vegetarian races, are inconsistent also.
III. Milk and its products and eggs are allowed by the faculty where they forbid flesh-meat, and our converts recover on a V.E.M. diet from gout and other disorders brought on by a riotous use of flesh.
IV. A V.E.M. diet is distinguished from a flesh diet in ecclesiastical rules of fasting, and tends to subdue the grosser appetites.
V. The word Vegetarian, far from being hundreds of years old, is a modern coined word, as Sir Henry might learn from Professor Skeat; far from committing us to eschew animal products, it no more implies eating or abstinence on the face of it, than do 'antiquary,' 'librarian.'
I am an antiquary. I was for three years librarian at Cambridge. No man ever summoned me to eat antiquities, or in a literal sense to become heluo librorum. Why, in the name of wonder, should an eminent surgeon let slip the dogs of scorn and indignation upon me, and call me in effect a liar, if, as a Vegetarian, I use the liberty allowed by my profession, and return sometimes to the diet of my cradle?
I have not been pleading pro domo. Personally, when alone, I am a Vegetarian of the straitest sect, never hearing of an experiment in plain living, but I am eager to try it. Yet from the first I resolved, when abroad, to give no offence by high-flown scruples. Fish, flesh, fowl, soup, with stock, are refused as easily as cauliflowers or turnips ; but if I pry into every pudding or cake—"you are quite sure there is no milk, no eggs, no butter here?"—I become a nuisance. If ladies heap eggs on your plate, flattering themselves that they are saving you from starvation, who so stony-hearted as to undeceive them? It pleases them, and does no harm to you. In my rooms I never take milk, but at refreshment bars I encourage the demand as against alcohol; so I buy honey, not because I cannot do perfectly well without it, but in order to promote bee-keeping.
