I am a vegetarian because I believe in the golden rule. _Act toward others as you would that others would act toward you_, has been the basic precept of the morals of the generations. This wonderful rule has been mouthed and mouthed since the days of Confucius, 2,400 years ago. But it never has been _lived_. Do as you would be done by. Certainly. _But to whom?_ Each class or clan has been its own little clique to whom it after a fashion observed this rule. Slavery and slaughter have been the rule toward everyone else. The Troglodytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse chariots with as little compunction as Americans hunt the wood-deer today. A Roman could take the life of his Gallic slave with as perfect impunity as an American can slay his bovine servant today. Yet to kill a Gaul was as really murder as to kill a Roman. It hasn’t been very long since all the Christian nations hunted their dusky brethren in Africa and sold and loaned and lashed them as we do the horse today. All these crimes are now matters of course to us. It is the same old story. We can see behind us but not around us. After so many centuries the solidarity of _our species_ has dimly dawned on us, but we can not discern the solidarity of all the animal world. We go on daily committing crimes as horrible as those we execrate. And we do it for the very same reason our long line of ancestors have done it, because the human mind is too feeble to be conscious of all the complicated relations which it is called upon to be conscious of.
The apology of the criminals has always been the same as it is today—that the crucified creatures were of a different order of being—that a chasm yawned between the persecutors and the persecuted—that there was not a solidarity. The Gaul has no rights because he was a “barbarian.” The fact that he has a nervous system and a love of life had nothing to do with it. The black man had no rights that were inconvenient to respect because he had no soul and because his subordination was God-ordained. And the honest ox and the faithful dog have no rights today, _because they were made to be murdered._
I am a vegetarian because I believe in justice. There is injustice in the universe, because there are beings in it who monopolize its sweets and opportunities. They want their own pleasures and also the pleasures of others. They shuffle upon others their bitters, and at the same time rob them of their sweets. Others live, not as ends, but as means and conveniences. I do not eat my fellow creatures, for the same reason I do not enslave my brother and treat my sister as an appendage and otherwise monopolize the sweets and opportunities of the planet. There are on this ball billions of beings. They are my fellow creatures. So far as I can make out they have approximately the same right to existence and to the enjoyment of existence as I have. I do not want their pleasures and I do not want them to drink my sorrows. I want simply my own and I am perfectly content to rob no one. In the words of another, “I never want happiness that gives another pain. I wish not happiness from others—only happiness out of the bosom of the great ALL which comes like the red flowers of the oleander.”