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THE JAINA GAZETTE
is destined one day to reach a fuil realization of that fact, but this glorious destiny can be achieved only through love, and every act against love is a barrier. In order to attain, man must inevitably give up killing, as a flagrant breach of love. Flesh-eating is nothing less than complicity in killing-being the receiver of stolen, nay worse than stolen, of murdered goods. It is the hoary teaching of the East that all life is "One without a second"-which is sorely needed to-day in the West. If and when India becomes, as she may in the near future, the equal partner of Britain, the Eastern wisdom will surely transform the world, making it possible for mercy to spread from pole to pole.
Slaughtering is a ghastly trade and is not done for love but for money. When no one buys fish, flesh or fowl, there will be no slaughtering, at any rate for food, and with that is bound to disappear the slaughtering for other purposes. The only way to stop killing is to cease to eat flesh. We cannot make other people do that, but each one can easily do it himself, and when a considerable number of people have decided to make this small sacrifice (which will turn out to be no sacrifice) flesh-eating will become unfashionable. Then the battle will be practically won, for great is the force of fashion and example. Then the great majority will rapidly follow suit, and it will not be long before killing for food is forbidden by law.
And when the evil of flesh-eating is generally recognised there will be little difficulty in stopping innumerable cruelties now inflicted on animals, the extent of which is not even suspected by anyone, unless he has paid special attention to the subject. Even professed humanitarians seldom know the full extent, as many concentrate on one particular form of cruelty which their own society is trying to stop.
The League of Ahimsa is out to diminish and ultimately abolish killing for food, ornament or so-called sport, but it concentrates specially on killing for food, and the only pledge asked of its members is that they will abstain from fish, flesh and Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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