DOGS KEEP MEN FROM EATING EACH OTHER. 73 
fmy the inhabitants of the fortunate isles of the Equator — Borneo, 
Celebes, Timor — where the nutmeg flourishes, but the dog is missing. 
I shall ask in this place not to add my curse to those which false 
morality and false philanthropy have so often launched against an- 
thropophagy. Anthropophagy is one of those diseases of the early 
childhood of our race — a depraved taste^ which misery explains, 
while it does not justify. It is a short madness, first occasioned by 
hunger, but humanity must pass through the phase of famine be- 
fore reaching that of abundance. 
Let us pity the cannibal, and not cur^e him too much, we civili- 
zees who massacre millions of men for motives certainly less plausi- 
ble than hunger. Of all the wars that men wage on each other, 
that in which they eat each other is the only one that I understand. 
I excuse all the guilty who are hungry, because the first law for all 
beings is to live, and because it is natural that man should kill his 
fellow man when he is persuaded that this death is indispensable 
to his own safety. These principles are every day practiced among 
civilized nations. Gericault, Delacroix, and Eugene Sue have made 
masterpieces of art by their application in desperate cases of ship- 
wreck, and public opinion pities more than it condemns the unhap- 
py starvelings of the Medusa and the Salamander. 
Tho evil is not so much that of roasting one’s enemy after he is 
dead, as that of killing him when he does not want to die. And 
the proof that the crime consists only in the manner of investigating 
the matter is, that the same moralists who so severely blame the 
hungry savage for assimilating to himself the substance of his ene- 
my under the form of roast beef, have made of Queen Artemisia a 
model of conjugal love for having swallowed her husband in pills. 
Where there is unpardonable crime, furious madness raised to 
the seventh power, is in the war with cannon-balls, which the civ- 
ilized peoples, French, English, Prussians, Russians, wage on each 
other without being hungry for each other’s flesh. 
War is the most atrocious of all human follies ; but the most ab- 
surd of these atrocities is certainly that in which they kill without 
appetite, for the mere pleasure of killing — where enemies court- 
eously salute before slaughtering each other— where the conquer- 
ors after the battle philanthropically busy themselves with adjust- 
7 
