Page:Henry Stephens Salt - A Plea for Vegetarianism and Other Essays.pdf/62

Henry Thompson's dislike of Vegetarian propagandists and Vegetarianism as a system ; but, in the meantime, we Vegetarians, or Food Reformers, or Akreophagists, or whatever it may please the British public to call us, are quite clear on this one point. It is the substance that we care for, and not the shadow. We have long asserted that flesh-food is not, as the doctors would have had us believe, a necessary part of our English diet system ; and this, our chief contention, is now explicitly admitted by Sir Henry Thompson. “It is a vulgar error,” he says, “to regard meat in any form as necessary to life.” Precisely so ; that has been the sum and substance of our teaching during the last quarter of a century, in spite of every sort of denial, ridicule, and misrepresentation ; and now that medical men are beginning to find they were after all in the wrong, they ingeniously attempt to cover their own confusion by raising a perfectly irrelevant cuckoo-cry about the title of their opponents. Let them call us anything they will—the mere name is quite immaterial to us ;—but at least let them have the candour to admit that we were right, and they were wrong as regards the necessity of the slaughter-house.