The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  Large populations were regarded as desirable in themselves. A nation’s strength and honour depended on its economic, demographic and military size. The Utilitarians put a new gloss on the ancient ethic of ‘peopling the earth’ by pointing out that since each person was a potential unit of happiness, sustaining the greatest number of people was an essential ingredient to achieving the greatest possible happiness. The agricultural system that produced the largest amount of food was clearly the best. Vegetarians argued – with a significant body of agronomists, economists and demographers backing them up – that arable agriculture sustained far more people per acre than rearing animals or hunting.

  The most important proponent of the moral implications of population growth was the Reverend William Paley (1743–1805), whose View of the Evidence of Christianity (1794) remained on the Cambridge University reading list right up to the twentieth century. In his Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), Paley argued that the scriptural permission to Noah was the only way of defending man’s moral right to kill animals. He acknowledged that some animals had to be eaten in order to prevent them becoming overpopulated and competing for resources with humans, and that others we had the right to kill because we had reared them. But he pointed out that these familiar counter-vegetarian arguments did not apply to fish, for example, and therefore could not comprehensively justify human habits without recourse to Scripture.

  However, Paley did not think that the divinely ordained moral right constituted a justification in itself for acting on that right. This was a classic illustration of the major philosophical shift in Britain, from Hume and Hutcheson’s metaethics, which aimed to identify the nature of morality as a whole, to the Utilitarians’ normative ethics which focused on identifying what people actually ought to do. Meat-eating may not have been a sin against animals, but was it reconcilable with the good of humanity? In his chapter ‘Of Population and Provision’, Paley pointed out that the principal aim of politics was to nurture the greatest population; and herein lay the problem with meat-eating: ‘a piece of ground capable of supplying animal food sufficient for the subsistence of ten persons would sustain, at least, double that number with grain, roots, and milk.’ On ten acres of land one could either grow crops to feed people directly, or one could raise animals, using some of the land for grazing and some for fodder crops. A certain proportion of any food given to animals was necessarily wasted (as faeces or heat, for example), thus leaving less nutrition in the end product. Furthermore, grasses grown for grazing were less productive plants than grain crops. Raising animals on land that could otherwise be used for arable agriculture was therefore a massive inefficiency.4

  Adam Smith had made similar calculations in The Wealth of Nations (1776): ‘A cornfield of moderate fertility produces a much greater quantity of food for man than the best pasture of equal extent.’ Furthermore, a field of potatoes produced three times as much nourishment as a field of wheat. If the British were to change their staple from bread to potatoes, Smith ambitiously promised that the economy would expand: ‘Population would increase, and rents would rise much beyond what they are at present.’ He did not go as far as to suggest that people should relinquish eating meat in order to increase population;5 but Paley transposed Smith’s theory of economic expansion to the domain of Utilitarian morality, and thus revealed the ethical angle to society’s choice of diet:

  In England, notwithstanding the produce of the soil has been of late considerably increased … yet we do not observe a corresponding addition to the number of inhabitants, the reason of which appears to me to be the more general consumption of animal food amongst us. Many ranks of people whose ordinary diet was, in the last century, prepared almost entirely from milk, roots, and vegetables, now require every day a considerable portion of the flesh of animals. Hence a great part of the richest lands of the country are converted to pasturage. Much also of the bread-corn, which went directly to the nourishment of human bodies, now only contributes to it by fattening the flesh of sheep and oxen. The mass and volume of provisions are hereby diminished, and what is gained in the amelioration of the soil is lost in the quality of the produce.

  This consideration teaches us that tillage, as an object of national care and encouragement, is universally preferable to pasturage, because the kind of provision which it yields goes much farther in the sustenation of human life.

  By this argument, following the vegetable diet was patriotic – and it earned Paley a place in the vegetarian symposium satirically portrayed by Thomas Love Peacock in the London Magazine, where he appears seated alongside Shelley, Lambe, Ritson, Godwin, Thomas Taylor and Sir John Sinclair at a ‘Dinner by the Amateurs of Vegetable Diet’.6 Despite such contemporaneous mockery, however, Paley’s agronomic principles are still broadly accepted today. The meat industry wasted resources and deprived untold numbers of people from existing.

  In the context of this new Utilitarian emphasis on dietary ethics, the shining example of the Hindus was once again polished up with a new gloss. It was their strict vegetarianism, observed Paley, that allowed the Hindus to sustain populations that dwarfed those of Europe. If they were to develop a British taste for meat, they would have to ‘introduce flocks and herds into grounds which are now covered with corn’ and their population would necessarily decline.7 (Indeed, it is precisely this shift towards Western levels of meat consumption in industrialising countries that is giving demographers today such anxiety about global food security.)

  The comparative efficiency of different land uses had been apparent to agricultural peoples for millennia. Plato and St Jerome observed – and John Evelyn reiterated – that the demand for meat increased land hunger and thus led to disputes with neighbouring peoples. The most common argument against vegetarianism which had been used since Greek antiquity was the one about needing to kill animals to prevent them overpopulating. In the words of Porphyry’s counter-vegetarian opponent, we had to eat animals, otherwise they would grow into such multitudes that they ‘would damage our lives, both by standing and fighting us, as they are naturally well equipped to do, and simply by consuming what the earth produces for our food’. The seventeenth-century philosopher Samuel von Pufendorf saw this competition for resources as the basis of Hobbes’ war in nature between man and the animals (another reason for Shelley to believe that the end of animal agriculture would bring an end to the war in nature). But this timeworn counter-vegetarian argument necessarily implied that breeding large numbers of farm-animals was a strain on resources, so it could just as easily be made into a case for vegetarianism. As Thomas Tryon observed in the seventeenth century, animals only existed in such great numbers because we bred them; the easiest way to curtail their population was therefore to stop bringing them into existence.8 In the eighteenth century, following Tryon’s lead, this classic defence of eating animals was transformed into an argument against eating so many of them. This itself reflects the fact that in the past meat was principally a by-product of agricultural systems in which animals were reared on otherwise unusable land and fed waste products. Traditionally, excess male calves of dairy herds and cows past milking age were killed as they would otherwise have continued to consume resources without returning anything to the system. But in the eighteenth century the meat industry was born: herds were bred for slaughter, and grain was grown exclusively to feed them.

  In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries vast swathes of the commoners’ traditional arable land had been enclosed and converted into sheep-pastures by manorial lords keen to cash in on the booming wool industry. Works like Thomas More’s Utopia complained that this greedy profit-chasing was depopulating the countryside. In the second half of the eighteenth century there was a new surge of enclosures conducted in the interests of agricultural improvement; and for the first time animals were raised on a large scale exclusively for the purpose of producing meat.9 Arable land that had once provided food for people was being converted to grow pasture and fodder crops for animals. John
Williamson of Moffat and John Oswald, who witnessed the effects of the infamous Highland Clearances, were among the first to build the critique of enclosures into a wholesale attack on meat production. By the 1780s it was common for established economists, agronomists and demographers to address the issue. The English enclosed their land much earlier than other European nations, where the practice only took hold in the nineteenth century. But even in France, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre pointed out that because grazing land was exempt from tithes, farmers had a counter-productive incentive to raise animals rather than growing food more efficiently with arable cultivation. The Chinese, he claimed, used their land much more sensibly by growing rice for human consumption and only feeding cattle with waste products like straw.10

  In his Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794–6) and Phytologia; or the Philosophy of Agriculture and Gardening (1800), Erasmus Darwin demonstrated with dispassionate technical detail how these new objections to the meat industry had become compelling even for the most staunch admirer of British roast beef. Darwin stuck to his claim that humans were anatomically omnivorous; that vegetarianism made the Hindus ‘feeble’, and that vegetable diets did more harm than good to medical patients in Europe. But faced with the inefficiency of animal agriculture, he warned that Britons did need to curtail their meat consumption and revert to a more vegetable-oriented diet: ‘perhaps tenfold the numbers of mankind can be supported by the corn produced on an hundred acres of land, than on the animal food which can be raised from it,’ he claimed. ‘This greater production of food by agriculture than by pasturage, shews that a nation nourished by animal food will be less numerous than if nourished by vegetable.’

  Darwin explained that the rapid growth of the meat industry was fuelled by landowners’ thirst for profit: pastoralism required less labour, and its products – meat, cheese and butter – being luxuries, fetched higher prices at market than arable produce. The increased profit margin provided a financial incentive to enclose arable land and revert it to animal pasturage. (This profit chasing is still seen by modern agronomists as the driving force behind the global rise in unsustainably high meat production.11) Since pasturage actually produced less food and employed fewer people, this quest for profit was responsible for emptying whole villages and starving the poor into slavery – scenes that Darwin vividly evoked by quoting Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, The Deserted Village. Moderating Rousseau’s critique, Darwin concluded that ‘This inequality of mankind in the present state of the world is too great for the purposes of producing the greatest quantity of human nourishment, and the greatest sum of human happiness.’

  The problem was exacerbated, said Darwin, by fermenting edible grain in the ‘destructive manufactory’ of liquor and strong beer, which basically meant ‘converting the natural nutriment of mankind into a chemical poison’. He threatened a national catastrophe ‘if the luxurious intemperance of consuming flesh-meat principally, and of drinking intoxicating liquors, should increase amongst us, so as to thin the inferior orders of society, by scarcity of food, and the higher ones by disease both of mind and body’. The only viable way of ‘preventing a nation from becoming too carnivorous’, he advised, was to ban the enclosure of arable land completely. Achieving this political imperative would ensure that Britain would progress to become ‘more populous, robust, prosperous, and happy, than any other nation in the world’. In a vein of Godwin-like optimism, he looked forward to a time when things were reformed in such a way ‘as may a hundred-fold increase the numbers of mankind, and a thousand-fold their happiness’.12

  Although Darwin himself did not advocate giving up meat altogether, his authoritative statistics provided the basis for the new case for vegetarianism. George Nicholson quickly inserted quotes from Darwin into his vegetarian anthologies, and connected them with those of the popular physician William Buchan, who similarly thought that agronomic factors should be taken into consideration in medical discussions about diet. ‘The excessive consumption of animal food,’ said Buchan, inflamed thirst, disease and ferocity and ‘is one great cause of the scarcity of grain. The food that a bullock affords, bears but a small proportion to the quantity of vegetable matter he consumes.’13 Joseph Ritson also quoted Paley’s arguments, so it is little surprise that Shelley underpinned his attack on political oppression with this new emphasis. Extending several lines of Darwin’s logic into robust radicalism, Shelley realised that meat-eating was not just a sign of wealth, it was one of the tools with which the rich oppressed the poor. The carnivorous rich literally monopolised the land by taking over more of it than they needed. Pointing his accusatory finger at consumers (in contrast to Darwin’s focus on agricultural producers), Shelley argued that the flesh gorged by the rich literally was the grain stolen from the mouths of the poor:

  The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth. The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals, at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation.

  Like Paley and Lambe, Shelley allowed that even the poor were to blame if they indulged a luxurious taste for meat: ‘The peasant cannot gratify these fashionable cravings without leaving his family to starve.’ Like Darwin – and Roger Crab and Thomas Tryon in the seventeenth century – Shelley pointed out that drinking alcohol carried the same implications, for it too was a superfluous luxury made from grain that could otherwise be eaten as food: ‘the use of animal flesh and fermented liquors,’ he wrote with characteristic bombast, ‘directly militates with this equality of the rights of man.’14

  William Lambe likewise saw arable agriculture as the key to social reform. ‘By the exercise of this beneficial art,’ he said, ‘myriads of human beings are called into life, who could otherwise have never existed.’ If people confined themselves to vegetables, he claimed, populations could be ‘increased to an indefinite extent’. Echoing Darwin, he also suggested that arable agriculture encouraged the arts of peace: ‘It seems no visionary or romantic speculation to conjecture, that if all mankind confined themselves for their support to the productions supplied by the culture of the earth, war, with its attendant misery and horrors, might cease to be one of the scourges of the human race.’ Like Darwin (and in contrast to Paley’s mixed-farming model), Lambe argued that the dairy industry was equally implicated in the culture of waste. Lambe was politically of a more moderate outlook than Shelley, but the agronomic arguments drew him into a radical position, for it was clear that meat and dairy were ‘monopolised’ by the rich. If everyone ate meat, a thriving population could not be sustained without resorting to the unstable and economically undesirable practice of importing food from abroad. Radicalism did not just lead to vegetarianism (as in Shelley’s case); people could be led to radicalism by vegetarianism.15

  Population studies had become one of the most important topics for Europeans from the late eighteenth century, and the formulations developed then remain the basic ingredients of the global agronomic debate even today. By far the most influential demographer of the period – and still regarded as the founder of the modern discipline – was the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834). Malthus’ father had been a friend of Rousseau, and brought his son up according to the principles of Émile. But by the age of thirty Malthus rejected his father’s faith in the perfectibility of mankind, and he published one of the most shocking works of economic realism the world had seen. His seminal Essay on the Principle Of Population (1798) aimed to refute the utopianism of Shelley’s father-in-law, William Godwin, and he specifically attacked the faith in the comparative efficiency of vegetarianism. In a game of political tit-for-tat, which stretched over three generations, Shelley and the Bracknell vegetarians took up the gauntlet and challenged the basis of Malthus’ agronomic assumptions.

  Malthus’ most controversial observatio
n was that populations had the potential to grow geometrically (at a rate of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on). Agricultural yields, meanwhile, were likely to decline as the soil became exhausted; even the greatest advocate of technological improvement, he suggested, could not expect yields to be increased at the same rate as populations. In the real world, populations were always limited by the means of subsistence: the poor stopped reproducing when they were so miserable they no longer had the capacity to sustain large families. If populations were encouraged to grow unchecked, he commented bleakly, a certain swathe of each population would occasionally have to die. If it wasn’t plague that killed them, there would have to be a war, and if neither of those materialised then the population would simply outstrip the supply of food and there would be famine. If the poor had more children than they could support, they were destined to live in abject poverty; regardless of whether one successfully averted plague or war, the same number of deaths would necessarily occur. Even Britain’s Poor Laws should be abolished or radically curtailed, he insisted. Institutionalised benevolence merely encouraged the poor to bring excess children into the world, which stretched food resources beyond their capacity, creating a dearth for everyone. It was better, he suggested, to leave people to the harsh laws of nature’s ‘order and harmony’ until they learned to limit their procreation within their means.

  A basic element of Malthus’ population dynamics had in fact been propounded by the Comte de Buffon in his attack on Rousseau and the vegetarians decades earlier. If populations did not sustain regular deaths, said Buffon, they would multiply so that ‘by their numbers, they would soon injure and destroy each other. For want of sufficient nourishment, their fecundity would diminish. Contagion and famine would produce the same effects.’ Malthus’ three instruments of population control are all there in Buffon – killing each other, disease and famine – with the only other alternative as decreased fecundity, which Malthus also allowed for. The disturbing difference is that Buffon wasn’t talking about humans, but about fish, and the mass-deaths he was justifying were not accidental but deliberate massacres committed by humans and other predators.16 Malthus’ demographic model was like a sociological version of Buffon’s ecological defence of predation, and both Buffon and Malthus were directing their arguments against vegetarians. Their laissez-faire attitude to natural checks and balances within ecological cycles – to which humans were subject as well as other animals – was in fundamental opposition to what they saw as the vegetarians’ utopian attempt to circumvent nature’s harsh laws. Some would say the analogy between Malthus and Buffon justified the accusation that Malthus complied with class-oppression by making famine and war look like natural phenomena rather than resulting from deliberate acts of political injustice. Indeed, Buffon’s follower John Brückner (1726–1804) had explicitly declared that warfare, like natural predation, was a providential blessing which benefited the general good by controlling populations.17 But in fact Malthus was more aware of the potential political abuse of population control than critics have allowed, and he warned that superficially philanthropic attempts to alleviate poverty would have the sinister effect of swelling armies and creating cheap labour from desperation.18 Malthus insisted that the only safe way for populations to grow was to improve agricultural yields, so people would naturally have larger families as supplies became abundant.