vegetarian restaurant. But that is an irrelevant, though most
fascinating, speculation. The point here is that if a nation is really
vegetarian let its government force upon it the whole horrible weight of
vegetarianism. Let its government give the national guests a State
vegetarian banquet. Let its government, in the most literal and awful
sense of the words, give them beans. That sort of tyranny is all very
well; for it is the people tyrannising over all the persons. But
"temperance reformers" are like a small group of vegetarians who should
silently and systematically act on an ethical assumption entirely
unfamiliar to the mass of the people. They would always be giving
peerages to greengrocers. They would always be appointing Parliamentary
Commissions to enquire into the private life of butchers. Whenever they
found a man quite at their mercy, as a pauper or a convict or a lunatic,
they would force him to add the final touch to his inhuman isolation by
becoming a vegetarian. All the meals for school children will be
vegetarian meals. All the State public houses will be vegetarian public
houses. There is a very strong case for vegetarianism as compared with
teetotalism. Drinking one glass of beer cannot by any philosophy be
drunkenness; but killing one animal can, by this philosophy, be murder.
The objection to both processes is not that the two creeds, teetotal and
vegetarian, are not admissible; it is simply that they are not admitted.
The thing is religious persecution because it is not based on the
existing religion of the democracy. These people ask the poor to accept
in practice what they know perfectly well that the poor would not accept
in theory. That is the very definition of religious persecution. I was
against the Tory attempt to force upon ordinary Englishmen a Catholic
theology in which they do not believe. I am even more against the
attempt to force upon them a Mohamedan morality which they actively
deny.