process

to reach the blood stream, a which is impossible to proteins. Out of them the animal reconstructs its own typical proteins, though it is still a matter of dispute whether this is done before they reach the blood, or by the active cells of the body to which they are carried by the blood stream. Moreover, the animal reconstructs quite different proteins from those which were supplied in the food, just as an architect can design an entirely different house from the materials provided by the house that has been taken down, and there is a strong presumption that every animal builds up proteins special to its kind. Comparatively recently Hopkins and Willcocks have shown that if rats and mice are given no other protein than the one contained in maize and called zein they die of protein starvation. By itself they cannot use the zein (or rather the zein derivatives), but if they are also given a very small quantity of a substance called trytophan, itself a derivative from many proteins, they begin to utilize the zein products and their protein starvation ceases. Evidently the body proteins of the mice contain the trytophan group, and no amount of other protein derivatives can make up for its absence, just as we may conceive a certain type of house that cannot be constructed without stones of a particular shape, however small a proportion these constitute in the finished fabric. Moreover, we are pretty certain that the human organism never utilizes for the making of its own protein all the protein derivatives with which it is presented from the food; a large part, often the greater part, do not fit and are passed on to the kidneys, where the characteristic nitrogen groups are broken off and excreted, leaving the residue to be burned up as fuel instead of utilized in tissue repair. On certain diets the organism may have to pick over a large quantity of protein derivatives before it finds the particular units it requires for its own constructive purposes; and in our present ignorance of the exact constituents of the human proteins, and even of food proteins, it is only common sense to keep the diet as diversified as possible, so as to make sure we are not leaving out the keystones of some important arch in the structure of nutri

tion. This, if you like, is a plea of ignorance, but it is the ignorance that says you had better walk by the old beaten road instead of across country, when the map is imperfect and the compass bearings doubtful.

There is another aspect from which food may be regarded-i. e., the availability of the energy it supplies, though hitherto we have only considered the diet of animals from this point of view. Every food is a source of energy, and we can calculate how much work a given amount of digestible food of known composition can give rise to, just as we can calculate how many horsepower hours there can be got out of a ton of coal. But suppose part of that ton of coal had to be used in driving a mechanical stoker to feed the coal into the main boiler, clearly a deduction must be made from the theoretical effectiveness of the coal. The same thing happens with food; some of the energy it possesses is spent in running the digestive machine, and with fibrous foods the toll thus taken may be great. A horse will starve on straw alone, however much it receives; for though it can digest and obtain nutriment from the straw, it uses up more energy in so doing than the digested material can supply, so that the animal is a loser on balance. With human dietaries we never reach anything like this level, but many of the unconcentrated vegetable foods do leave a comparatively small proportion of their energy available for work, because so much is used up in driving the machinery of digestion. It would be possible to construct a diet which would contain all the protein and supply all the heat usually considered necessary for existence, but which would keep a man entirely occupied in the work of digestion without leaving any margin for external activities. Now, putting out of consideration such extremes, we see that civilized life in its higher forms does demand sudden and extreme outputs of energy-not necessarily of great duration; the call is for speed and intensity more than for quantity of work, and this I would seem to necessitate the more concentrated forms of diet which consume a minimum of their value in their digestion. A farm horse at plow will get along on indifferent hay and a little

maize, but for the race-horse you want the heaviest of oats and the choicest alfalfa forage.

The composition of a food as regards proteins, carbohydrates, and fats is only the first approximation in its valuation. The digestibility and available energy of these constituents form a second and closer approximation, but there are still to be considered certain third terms which recent research is showing to be of great importance. These are the food constituents, generally small in amount, which often confer flavor, but also act as excitants and bring certain important bodily actions into play. For example, Pawlow has shown that the secretion of the gastric juice necessary for the digestion of food in the stomach is a threefold process, excited in part by the sight of the food before it reaches the mouth, in part by a sort of nerve telegraphy when the food is being masticated, but only completed when the food actually reaches the stomach. Furthermore, this third stimulus, necessary for the full secretion, is only excited by such bodies as are contained in meat extracts, substances practically confined to flesh foods, and absent from vegetables. Again, in Pawlow's experiments purely nervous messages undoubtedly excited certain secretions, but Starling and his co-workers have been showing that many of the other secretions and vital actions have to be initiated chemically. Some trace of a substance, often one that we should little suspect of any such property, is introduced into the body, in the food or otherwise, and at some point meets with a particular locked-up material to which it acts as a key, causing the liberation of the latter body into the blood stream, whereby it is carried to a particular organ, which it immediately excites into activity. Starling's conception of chemical excitants or "hormones "has been extended by Armstrong to include a series of remarkable vital actions, where small quantities of apparently indifferent substances are found to excite profound actions in the cell, actions in which they themselves can take no commensurate share. Now, as we do not understand a tithe of the actions going on in a well-regulated active body, the plea is again for a varied diet, and

especially for one containing flesh foods, which experience as well as experiment would suggest are richer than vegetable products in these excitants.

And here we find ourselves in agreement with one of the claims or tacit implications of vegetarianism. Put high, the claim is that a vegetarian diet makes for quieter and more law-abiding citizens; that many people have found that they can thereby better adjust their lives to the requirements of a modern city civilization. Now the majority of people have to lead a subordinate and routine life, in which it pays them, not to react easily, but to be safe and unemotional, minimizing inconvenient desires and restless imaginings. Even on a higher plane, the man at grips with a big piece of work demanding the whole of his mind asks to be delivered from all excitements and stirrings that might weaken his concentration. Vegetarianism probably counts its most convinced supporters among these two classes-such men and women as are making themselves ascetics for the better furthering of some set purpose, and those other men and women who want to keep out of the danger zone, avoiding meat as they would alcohol, art, love-making, and other heady excitements. But valuable as these people may be, the community needs even more the full-blooded and the adventurous; the big men, the men who make things, who will not forego emotions and experiences because of the risks of shipwreck they may be running. "More life and fuller" is their watchword; and though these may break under the strain, nature even more surely eliminates the ascetics in whom the will to live burns low.

Although as yet only a matter of speculative interest possessed of no argumentative value, there is another aspect of the vegetarian diet worth consideration, and that is its greater economy and consequent inevitableness as soon as the world's population grows up to the limit of the land available for cultivation.

All flesh is grass; that is, it must be regarded as a secondary product reconstructed by the animal out of materials that have been previously manufactured by the plant, and in this reconstruction a considerable amount of waste is in

volved. The plant is the only real creative agency in nature; it is a mechanism which has learned to trap the external supplies of energy coming from the sun in order to build up the elaborate foodstuffs we call proteins, carbohydrates, and fats out of the very simple inorganic materials that are present in the air, in water, and in the soil. This is an upgrade process; the products of a plant's growth are richer in energy than the materials from which they started, energy which the plant has filtered out from the light that fell upon it.

It is with great difficulty that we can imitate the plant's processes in the laboratory, and in doing so we have always to pour in an amount of energy-electricity, heat, etc. greatly in excess of that which is stored in the finished product.

Starting with water and carbonic acid, we could prepare a pound of sugar synthetically, but even if the incidentals employed in the process were less costly we should still have to burn a great deal more coal-i. e., spend more energy than we should find finally stored up in the sugar. A green leaf manufactures sugar from the same starting substances and uses only the gratuitous energy supplied by the light. The animal, on the contrary, lives by carrying on a down-grade process; it resolves the complicated materials which the plant has manufactured into the simplest and least valuable compounds, transforming sugar, for example, back into carbonic acid and water. When the animal is growing and putting on weight it does not reconstitute the whole of its food into an equivalent in meat; the greater part is used up in keeping the machinery running, just as, to take an extreme example, an adult man will consume twenty ounces of dry food per day and not increase in weight at all.

We are accustomed to call the food required to keep the animal alive its maintenance diet, but even the food over and above this will by no means be wholly transformed into flesh and fat. Under the best possible conditions, a pound of pure digestible fat added to a maintenance diet will only mean half a pound of fat laid on by the animal, while a pound of starch or sugar or protein cannot make more than a quarter of a pound increase. This is the maximum

efficiency after the animal's maintenance requirements have been supplied, so that when maintenance is also allowed for, the net result of feeding can never show such a good conversion of vegetable food into animal food.

Lawes and Gilbert, after a number of inquiries into the dietary of fattening animals in England, found that about ten pounds of dry food were consumed in order to produce a pound of increased weight in the animal, little more than half of which increase would represent meat suitable for human consumption. This means that, at a most moderate computation, something like twenty pounds of vegetable food in its normal condition has to be consumed for every pound of meat that is produced; and though a certain proportion of this vegetable food may be of such a low grade that it would not be suitable for consumption by man, the discrepancy is still enormous between the food value of vegetable produce before and after its conversion into meat. To put the argument from another point of view-an acre of good land in England will yield about a ton of wheat grain and rather more than a ton of straw. Out of the ton of wheat grain we may expect to get about 1,800 pounds of concentrated human food, whereas if the wheat and the straw together were fed to cattle, we could not expect more than 250 pounds of beef, which quantity would possess a lower feeding value (in the sense of maintaining life) than the wheat flour. In other words, an acre of wheat consumed as such would keep alive ten people, when the beef grown off that same acre would only support one. Of course the cattle would produce something else— leather and other by-products for the use of mankind-but then the wheat also produces straw and bran of some value in the human economy.

If we look at the matter still more on the lines of what is actually taking place, we shall see that this economy of a vegetable diet, its power to support the maximum amount of life on a given area, is even more pronounced in practice. In nearly all countries cattle and sheep are chiefly raised by grazing, and although many farmers realize that more meat could be produced if the land were cultivated and

the stock fed upon the produce, still the cheapness of the grazing method causes it to be most widely followed. Recent experiments in Great Britain would show that grazing-land of a poor quality will not raise more than about seventy pounds of mutton per acre per annum, or about double as much total live-weight increase in the sheep. Under the plow, we should expect that same class of land to give us at least half a ton of oats or wheat to the acre- say, 900 pounds of concentrated vegetable food in place of seventyfive pounds of mutton. Of course more labor, even animal labor, has had to be spent in growing the wheat or oats, but this could have been maintained on the offal and straw and still have left the net result of 900 pounds of pure vegetable food. Another form of calculation gives much the same kind of figure, that a farm of 300 acres, partly good grazingland and partly arable, produced in a year about 40,000 pounds of beef and mutton, all the material grown on the arable land having been consumed by the stock. This gives about 130 pounds of meat produced per acre; but then the land was good and the farming intensive enough to produce something like 1,800 pounds per acre of vegetable material suitable for human food.

All these various lines of experiments and observation converge on the conclusion that a given acreage of land will yield from twelve to twenty times as much vegetable as it will of flesh food, assuming the two to be of equal value for supporting life. Nor can we alter this ratio by any kind of specialized farming; as a matter of experience, we can intensify the production of plant material to a remarkable degree, but it is almost impossible to crowd stock on a small area, however much food is available, because epidemic disease of some kind or other is sure to set in.

These facts would necessitate a completely vegetarian diet for the human race if the world's population is to be allowed to grow up to its maximum, and we see examples of this latter process in southern China and other densely populated Oriental countries. But whether

the human race will thus permit itself to be driven on to a low and uniformly diffused standard of living is another question, not to be settled by any appeal to science. The Western peoples everywhere show signs of a determination to maintain themselves in conditions far above the minimum necessary for existence, even though this standard has to be preserved by a restriction of their numbers, tacit or otherwise. It can hardly be doubted that such communities will always be able to hold their own, and that when pressure arises they will even take the offensive against the communities living on the lower scale. War may change its scope or type, but the struggle of one race to supplant another, of one form of civilization to crowd out another that is less efficient, must continue and will be intensified as the habitable world fills up. At the present time we see that certain Oriental races, by their contentment with a lower standard of living, can undersell and would eventually displace the Western races by their cheapness, provided they can live under the shelter of the white man's system of law and order. Sooner or later the white man revolts and refuses to submit to competition on these racially unequal terms; he excludes the Oriental by force, and his continued ability to do so will depend upon the vigor, the initiative, we might even say the masterfulness, of the community he develops. Now these qualities are of the sort which we cannot help associating with flesh-eating races, and we have been endeavoring to show that there is some scientific as well as sociological basis for this connection. So we take leave to doubt whether the human race will eventually become vegetarians, nor can we, as lovers of a rich and full-blooded people likely to remain dominant in the press of nations, advocate the spread of vegetarianism, despite its undoubted economy. For men, as for nations, vegetarianism is one form of the Polonius creed of playing safety, but playing safety at best only secures an undisturbed existence and may only end in an early and unhonored grave.

VOL. CXXIII.-No. 734.-27

B

OBBY FARQUHAR often wondered afterward why it should have been Reynolds whom he met that night, rather than any one of half a dozen other men who would have extended a similar invitation. "It was just one of those things," he once said to me, "that some people call coincidence, and some people call the working of Fate, and in which some other people see 'the hand of Providence,' but whatever you choose to call it, it begins with what looks like a trifle, and ends by knocking the most careful plans into pieces and changing a fellow's whole life for him."

Bobby, who was the Governor's private secretary, had been spending that particular Sunday with certain of his chief's confidential friends and advisers in the principal commercial city of the State, conferring about the approaching nominating convention, and inasmuch as it was desirable that neither reporters nor politicians should know of his presence in town, he had not cared either to register at a hotel or to be seen about the clubs, where he was well known. Consequently, upon arriving in the city that morning he had sent his bag by messenger to Bruce Hayward's, where he often stayed, together with a note promising to get out to the house himself in time for a chat that night, if possible.

Early in the afternoon he was told that the Haywards were out of town, and then he began trying to locate his bag. Eventually he learned that it had been received, apparently by a servant of Hayward's, who must have left the house immediately thereafter, for although Bobby telephoned out there at intervals through the afternoon and evening, he was unable to get any response.

About ten o'clock that night he was on his way to his last appointment, when he unexpectedly met Jack Reynolds, an old college friend whom he had not seen in seven or eight years. Both men were

in haste, and when Reynolds learned that Bobby must take an early morning train back to the Capitol, and therefore could not possibly join him at luncheon the next day, he insisted upon his spending the night with him at his home in Glenwood. To Bobby's protest against going to a suburb when he had to make so early a start next morning, Reynolds retorted: "Suburb nothing! Your train stops at Glenwood, man! You'll save twentyfive minutes on your starting-time. No, you won't inconvenience anybody," he rapidly continued. "Mother and the girls are still in Europe, and Dad's in Canada. Business brought me East unexpected, and I'm keeping bachelor hall out there, with Annie, our old cook, looking after me. Here's my latch-key. I've got to meet my aunt, who's coming in about half past eleven, and take her to a hotel, so you'll get there before I do. Go in and make yourself at home, just as you used to. You'll find pajamas and things in my room.'

1

"Same old room?"

"Same old room. If you hunt around, you'll probably find another one ready for you somewhere. Annie always keeps one fixed up for my unexpected friends. By the way, you'd better take the latch off the front door when you go in. Annie's a good cook, but she has the disposition of a Tartar, and one thing she won't stand for is being rung up in the wee sma' to let somebody in. Whatever you do, don't wake Annie! Good-by, Bob. See you later.”

Something over an hour thereafter the Governor's secretary, still without his bag, was on his way to Glenwood, his mind intent, as it had been all day, on the plans and purposes of "the Chief."

Curtis Rhodes, the Governor, had been elected only after a disrupting struggle in his own party; his first term of office had been much like that of other Governors who had steadfastly tried to work