the
permission to eat it was nugatory, for it was generally eaten by some other
animal before man got hold of it; or failing this it was often poisonous, so
that practically people were forced to evade the law by some of the means above
spoken of, or to become vegetarians. This last alternative was so little to the
taste of the Erewhonians, that the laws against killing animals were falling
into desuetude, and would very likely have been repealed, but for the breaking
out of a pestilence, which was ascribed by the priests and prophets of the day
to the lawlessness of the people in the matter of eating forbidden flesh. On
this, there was a reaction; stringent laws were passed, forbidding the use of
meat in any form or shape, and permitting no food but grain, fruits, and
vegetables to be sold in shops and markets. These laws were enacted about two
hundred years after the death of the old prophet who had first unsettled
people's minds about the rights of animals; but they had hardly been passed
before people again began to break them.
    I was told that the most painful consequence of all this folly did not lie
in the fact that law-abiding people had to go without animal food - many nations
do this and seem none the worse, and even in flesh-eating countries such as
Italy, Spain, and Greece, the poor seldom see meat from year's end to yearns
end. The mischief lay in the jar which undue prohibition gave to the consciences
of all but those who were strong enough to know that though conscience as a rule
boons, it can also bane. The awakened conscience of an individual will often
lead him to do things in haste that he had better have left undone, but the
conscience of a nation awakened by a respectable old gentleman who has an unseen
power up his sleeve will pave hell with a vengeance.
    Young people were told that it was a sin to do what their fathers had done
unhurt for centuries; those, moreover, who preached to them about the enormity
of eating meat, were an unattractive academic folk, and though they overawed all
but the bolder youths, there were few who did not in their hearts dislike them.
However much the young person might be shielded, he soon got to know that men
and women of the world - often far nicer people than the prophets who preached
abstention - continually spoke sneeringly of the new doctrinaire laws, and were
believed to set them aside in secret, though they dared not do so openly. Small
wonder, then, that the more human among the student classes