1876.] 
The Great Dietetic Reform 
21 
that drunkenness — or rather the appetite for alcoholic 
drinks — is merely a consequence of the use of animal food. 
Now, that a man who is confined to a dry animal diet may 
feel more thirst than one who feeds mainly upon juicy fruits 
will not be disputed : but the craving for alcohol is not 
essentially connected with thirst ; it is merely one mani- 
festation of a tendency felt more or less among all people 
quite irrespective of diet — the love for narcotics. Whether 
this desire is to be gratified with alcohol, opium, Cannabis 
indicus, betel, or coca, is a mere accident of locality. Now 
it certainly cannot be contended, with any respeCt for faCts, 
that the nations which make the nearest approach to vege- 
tarianism are any the less inclined to lap themselves in a 
temporary elysium, by the use of some drug of this class, 
than the most carnivorous tribes. Nor is alcohol itself 
scorned by people whose food consists chiefly of vegetables. 
The African negro — fed mainly on bananas and maize — • 
quaffs rum as eagerly as the carnivorous red man of North 
America. 
We must now ask what, if any, are the physical benefits 
to be derived from a purely vegetable diet ? Vegetarians 
contend that by rejecting animal food we should prolong our 
lives, and increase in strength, health, and capacity for 
work, whether intellectual or muscular. Such assertions 
are equally difficult to prove and to refute. If we could 
divide the people — say of. England, or of France, or of 
Germany — into two sections, each comprising one-half of 
every class, rank, and occupation, and could feed the one 
for some few generations on a strictly vegetable regimen, 
whilst the other were permitted to adhere to its present diet, 
we might then obtain results capable of deciding the 
question ; but the faCts and arguments now brought forward 
are lamentably defective. 
Some few individuals up and down England may have 
found or fancied themselves the better in health after bidding 
a last farewell to beef or mutton. We do not dispute the 
possibility of such cases ; but we have not the slightest 
doubt that quite as many persons could be found who would 
be benefitted by a more liberal supply of sound animal food. 
We have known persons who — in the days of ’48, when the 
millennium was to have been suddenly brought in by revo- 
lutions and “ movements,” and articles in the People's 
Journal — gave the vegetarian system a trial. Some of these 
experimentalists held out for four or five months, others for 
as many years ; but none of them could frankly declare 
that they experienced any tangible improvement in health, 
