Enjoy and let others enjoy. Live and let live. Do more. _Live and help live._ Do to beings below you as you would be done by beings above you. Pity the grub and the ladybug, and have mercy on the mole. Poor, defenceless, undeveloped, untaught creatures. They are our fellow mortals. They are enmeshed in the same mighty processes as we. They came from the same source and are destined to the same end. They lived, moved and breathed on primeval land fragments when the continents we creep over were sleeping in the seas. They are our ancestors. They are the forms of being that have made you and me possible. Let us be brothers and sisters to them, not ruffians; pity them and help them and pray for their untaught natures. Let us be consistent, for we have but one life to live. We are striving for the amelioration of this suffering world. Let us be economical. Let us not with one hand pour oil upon its agonies and with the other inflict gashes. Let us vow allegiance to the principles of universal courtesy and love, whether to the lone worm wandering in the twilight of consciousness, the feathered forms of the fields and forest, the heifer of the meadows, the simple savage on the banks of the gladed river, the political slaves whom men call wives, or the economic exiles of industry. The same spirit of sympathy and fraternity that broke the black man’s manacles and is today melting the white woman’s chains will tomorrow emancipate the workingman and the heifer, and as the ages bloom and the great wheels of the centuries grind on, the same spirit of leaven shall banish _Selfishness_ from the earth and convert the planet finally to one unbroken and unparalleled spectacle of _Peace_, _Justice and Solidarity._
End of Project Gutenberg's Why I Am a Vegetarian, by J. Howard Moore