brains and dulled nerves; but you would certainly never suspect
this from a study of history. What you find in history is that
all men crave meat, all struggle for it, and the strongest and
cleverest get it. Everywhere you find the subject classes living
in the midst of animals which they tend, but whose flesh they
rarely taste. Even in modern America, sweet land of liberty, our
millions of tenant farmers raise chickens and geese and turkeys,
and hardly venture to consume as much as an egg, but save
everything for the summer-boarder or the buyer from the city. It
would not be too much to say of the cultural records of early man
that they all have to do, directly or indirectly, with the
reserving of fresh meat to the masters. In J. T. Trowbridge's
cheerful tale of the adventures of Captain Seaborn, we are told
by the cannibal priest how idol-worship has ameliorated the
morals of the tribe--

For though some warriors of renown
Continue anthropophagous,
'Tis rare that human flesh goes down
The low-caste man's aesophagus!

I suspect that we should have to go back to the days of the
cave-man to find the first lover of the flesh-pots who put a
taboo upon meat, and promised supernatural favors to all who
would exercise self-control, and instead of consuming their meat
themselves, would bring it and lay it upon the sacred griddle, or
altar, where the god might come in the night-time and partake of
it. Certainly, at any rate, there are few religions of record in
which such devices do not appear. The early laws of the Hebrews
are more concerned with delicatessen for the priests than with