Note 190 — XXXI. PALEY. 1743–1805.

This popular excuse is perhaps the feeblest and most disingenuous of all the defences usually made for flesh-eating. Can the mere gift of life compensate for all the horrible and frightful sufferings inflicted, in various ways, upon their victims by the multiform selfishness and barbarity of man? To what unknown, as well as known, tortures are not every day the victims of the slaughter-house subjected? From their birth to their death, the vast majority—it is too patent a fact—pass an existence in which freedom from suffering of one kind or other—whether from insufficient food or confined dwellings on the one hand, or from the positive sufferings endured in transitu to the slaughter-house by ship or rail, or by the brutal savagery of cattle-drivers, &c.—is the exception rather than the rule.