. None such, he said,
should be eaten, save what had died a natural death, such as fruit that was
lying on the ground and about to rot, or cabbage-leaves that had turned yellow
in late autumn. These and other like garbage he declared to be the only food
that might be eaten with a clear conscience. Even so the eater must plant the
pips of any apples or pears that he may have eaten, or any plum-stones,
cherry-stones, and the like, or he would come near to incurring the guilt of
infanticide. The grain of cereals, according to him, was out of the question,
for every such grain had a living soul as much as man had, and had as good a
right as man to possess that soul in peace.
    Having thus driven his fellow-countrymen into a corner at the point of a
logical bayonet, from which they felt that there was no escape, he proposed that
the question what was to be done should be referred to an oracle in which the
whole country had the greatest confidence, and to which recourse was always had
in times of special perplexity. It was whispered that a near relation of the
philosopher's was lady's- to the priestess who delivered the oracle, and the
Puritan party declared that the strangely unequivocal answer of the oracle was
obtained by backstairs influence; but whether this was so or no, the response as
nearly as I can translate it was as follows:
 
»He who sins aught
Sins more than he ought;
But he who sins nought
Has much to be taught.
Beat or be beaten,
Eat or be eaten,
Be killed or kill;
Choose which you will.«
 
It was clear that this response sanctioned, at any rate, the destruction of
vegetable life when wanted as food by man; and so forcibly had the philosopher
shown that what was sauce for vegetables was so also for animals, that, though
the Puritan party made a furious outcry, the acts forbidding the use of meat
were repealed by a considerable majority. Thus, after several hundred years of
wandering in the wilderness of philosophy, the country reached the conclusions
that common sense had long since arrived at. Even the Puritans, after a vain
attempt to subsist on a kind of jam made of apples and yellow cabbage-leaves,
succumbed to the inevitable, and resigned themselves to a diet of roast beef and
mutton, with all the usual adjuncts of a modern dinner-table.
    One would have thought that the dance they had been led by the old prophet,
and that still madder dance
