THE MEAT FETISH. 15
flesh diet are plentiful. The races which eat little or no meat are stronger than those which eat much. The Japanese, Chinese, and Hindoos, whose staple food is rice, can perform feats of strength and endurance which no European could rival; and the European peasant who rarely eats meat is stronger than the man of the higher classes who frequently does. I have heard the story of a spectator watching the unloading of an Indian merchantman in the Thames. Four able-bodied men tottered along the quay with a huge chest between them. "I saw one man, a Hindoo, carry that chest aboard at Calcutta, said the captain. I have seen fellahin in Egypt carrying the trunks of tourists across a narrow bit of desert where two railways failed to connect, two or three great trunks strapped to the back, bent double, of a single man, in a way that would take away an Anglo-Saxon porter's breath to look at it. Lafcadio Hearn tells us that the average Japanese can walk fifty miles a day without becoming tired. Although there is a mere handful of vegetarians in Europe, they are already gathering in far more than their share of athletic honours. The great walking match from Berlin to Vienna in 1893 was won by two vegetarians—Herr Elsasser and Herr Pietz—and the fastest meat-eater was twenty-two hours behind them. Karl Mann, another vegetarian, won a similar race in 1902 from Dresden to Berlin. There were thirty-two competitors, seventeen of whom were vegetarians. The first six who finished were vegetarians. Only thirteen completed the race, and of these ten were vegetarians. One of the best-known amateur athletes in England, Mr. Eustace Miles, frequent holder of the Amateur Tennis Championship and Amateur Racket Championship, in England, America, and Canada, never touches flesh, fish, or fowl, and is a writer on the subject of diet. Vegetarian cyclists have also made an excellent showing.
There are two kinds of objectors to vegetarianism—those who say, "Oh, of course it is all well enough
