Thus the big fish eat the little fish — the big trees (by absorbing and monopolizing the nutriment) “eat up” the little trees — the strong animals eat the weak animals and so on — ad infinitum.
Man is no exception. Conquering and masterful nations have ever been ravenous devourers of flesh-food; and most of them have also been man-eaters. The slaughter-houses of Christendom reek with the dying effluvia of millions and millions of butchered brutes; that man — the King of Animals — may day by day eat flesh, drink blood and gnaw bones.
Even cannibalism is not extinct in far lands, nor quite unknown in the centers of our proudest civilizations. With the first great revolutionary cataclysm, its revival upon a gigantic scale is not an improbability.
During the eleventh century, man’s flesh was cooked, sold and eaten in England, and Englishmen may again revert to anthropophagy, if ever their imported food supplies should be suddenly and entirely cut off; either by convulsions of nature or acts of war. Ship-wrecked crews have repeatedly saved themselves by casting lots and devouring some of their number: and shipwrecked nations (loaded up to the hatches with seething cargos of festering useless nondescripts), may yet be driven to do the same.
Innumerable are the folk-lore legends, relating to ancient and modern man-eaters. Formal human sacrifices upon the Alters of Idols are quite common. In Mexico and Ancient Britain, prelates butchered their victims (generally young virgins) in public, amid the acclaim of musical instruments, the chanting of beautiful liturgies, and the hosanna shouts of the mob.
The modern prelate does not employ the rude smoking gully-knife, but uses other weapons, ten times more keen and more destructive. For every human sacrifice ‘offered-up’ in olden times, millions are offered now.
Professor Huxley pictorially describes an African butcher’s shop, where human steaks, roasts and sirloins, were systematically retailed.
Josephus tells us of mothers who ate their own infants during the last siege of Jerusalem, and in many later sieges human flesh has been consumed.
Oriental traditions record of King Richard Lion Heart, that once upon a time when presiding at a feast of moslem heads, he remarked with grim matter-of-factness ‘one roast Saracen made good entertainment for nine or ten of my good Christian men.’ An English Crusading rhymer is even proud of this —
Very intelligent New Zealand aboriginals may still be found, who describe with much apparent gusto, how (in comparatively recent dates) they satiated their ravenous hunger, by banqueting all night upon the grilled flesh of foemen they had tomahawked during the day. Neither is it uncommon to hear tattooed old veterans, tell how war-captives were penned up like cattle and fattened upon each other, until required for the tribal oven (formed of red-hot stones, paved into an oval hollow in the ground): — how then the fattest were selected one by one, taken out, systematically bled, disemboweled and hung up by the heels on neighboring trees; just as sheep, swine, and cattle are exposed for sale, in our own abattoirs and meat-markets. The Maoris also have a tradition, that if a man kills and eats his enemy, he by doing so, absorbs all the dead man’s vitality, strength, and courage.
In the nascent Colony of New Zealand, missionaries, soldiers, whalers and pioneers were often cooked and eaten; but by a general consensus of epicurean opinion the ‘Pakeha’s’ flesh was voted bad form, principally because it was ‘too tough and too salty.’
During the War on Secession, Northern infantry-men accidentally imprisoned in a Virginian mine, devoured each other one at a time; the last man (John Ewing) dying of hunger, and leaving a written record of the facts, sealed up in a flask.
The story of Sawny Bean is well known, and the classical legends of the Cyclops, the Giants, the Phalaris Bull, the Moloch holocausts and Homer’s Polyphemus.
Anthropophagy has been practiced in Australia, both by whites and blackfellows. In New Guinea and portions of Africa, man-eating is quite an ordinary custom to this hour. Marcus Clarke describes how Gabbet, an English-born Botany Bay convict, induced his prison comrades to escape with him (into the bush), in order that he might have a holiday and a feast, picking their succulent bones and sucking out the marrow thereof.
All over continental Europe there is a popular superstition that Jew Rabbis steal and murder Christian infants and maidens, in order to use the blood on the door-lintels, at Passover and other ceremonials.
A similar charge was brought against the early Christians, and even proved in the Imperial Law Courts, if we are to judge by the verdicts.
Human fat is regularly retailed in modern drug stores and human heads are even now a marketable commodity in the South Seas. There are also mystic brotherhoods in our midst, whose initiates pledge fidelity, and obligate themselves to life-long secrecy, by drinking blood out of a skull, over emblems of violent death — with daggers pointed at their throats.
The foundation stones of many famous buildings, palaces, castles, temples, and monuments, have been emblematically laid upon the living body of a man — the Kremlin for example.
Is not the Communion Service allegorical anthropophagy? Is it not a pious periodical cannibal feast in more ways than one? Does not the wine symbolize human blood, and the wafers typify human flesh?
Metaphorically considered, every trading Christian State is a meat market, wherein the flesh, bones, and blood not only of men, but of women and little children are bought and sold daily — “offered up” nominally for the “Love of God” really for the Love of Dollars.
Atrocities of the most revolting description are of daily, hourly occurrence, not only in Turkey and Siam, but in New York and Chicago; not only in Cuba and Port Arthur, but in London, Madrid, and Paris; not only in Mashonaland, and on the Congo, but in St. Petersburg and Berlin. Men, women, and little children are being everywhere starved slowly to the grave, worked till they fall down, driven insane by legislation, and even tortured to death, inch by inch.
Great financial corporations (backed by the State) directed mostly by Hebrews, literally coin Great Empires into golden dividends: and upon the share lists of mortgage banks and man-devouring institutions generally, may be found the names of bishops, popes, preachers, generals, governors, statesmen — and other human Carnivores by the thousand. He who doubts should look up the official share registers, and behold the long rows of adorable names belonging to High Priests, Philanthropists and Rulers, appearing thereon.
Cannibalism was practiced in Ancient Greece at the period of highest culture. Herodotus describes Asian feasts where man’s flesh was the chief dish: and down to the Thirteenth Century the Tibetans were in the habit of making their parents into broth.
There are confraternaties still in existence, into which no one is ever admitted until he has killed a man. Among the Dyaks (as among our own ancestors) a youth is never considered a full-grown person capable of founding a home until he has slain at least one enemy in battle. The Thugs of India (a religious sect) brought the science of holy murder, by strategic violence, to such a pitch of perfection that they have never been surpassed — not even by Grant or Moltke.
The Kinderawas of India, make a regular practice of eating all their diseased, useless, senile, and decrepit relations: just as packs of wolves fall upon any of their number that is seriously wounded in foray.