But this question of butchery is not merely one of kindness or unkindness to animals, for by the very facts of the case it is a human question of no slight importance, affecting as it does the social and moral welfare of those more immediately concerned in it. Of all recognised occupations by which in civilised countries a livelihood is sought and obtained, the work which is looked upon with the greatest loathing (next to the hangman's) is that of the butcher—as witness the opprobrious sense which the word "butcher" has acquired. Owing to the instinctive horror of bloodshed, which is characteristic of all normal civilised beings, the trade of doing to death countless numbers of inoffensive and highly-organised creatures amid scenes of indescribable filth and ferocity is delegated—in the large towns, at any rate—to a pariah class of "slaughtermen," who are thus themselves made the victims of a grievous social wrong. "I'm only doing your dirty work. It's such as you makes such as us," is said to have been the remark of a Whitechapel butcher to a flesh-eating gentleman who remonstrated with him for his brutality; and the remark was a perfectly just one. To demand a product which can only be procured at the cost of the intense suffering of the animal and the deep degradation of the butcher, and by a process which not one flesh-eater in a hundred would himself under any circumstances perform or even witness, is conduct as callous, selfish, and unsocial as could well be imagined.

For butchery, as Sir Benjamin Richardson used to point out, is essentially a "dangerous trade." It not only deadens and destroys the moral sympathies, but it has the physical effect of straining the nerves and weakening the heart of the slaughterman, and thus naturally induces a tendency to have recourse to drink. How often, too, in reading of some murderous crime, has one seen it stated that the criminal was a butcher; as, for instance, in the Austrian "ripper" case, when, as the papers stated, a woman of the "unfortunate" class was killed by a young butcher of herculean frame, by whom it is supposed a previous victim had also been slaughtered. To have accustomed one's self to a total disregard for the pleading terror of sensitive animals and to a murderous use of the knife is a terrible power for society to put into the hands of its lowest and least responsible members.

The blame must ultimately fall on society itself, and not on the individual slaughterman. No one had a better knowledge of this subject than the late Mr. H. F. Lester, and this is his opinion:

"We must take into consideration the fact that the ranks of slaughtermen are habitually made up from persons in whom one could hardly expect to find the sentiment of pity strongly developed; yet, even among these, there is a certain air of dissatisfaction with the work they are compelled to do, and a mixture of insolence and shamefacedness, of swagger and evident dislike of inspection, which makes one think they know their trade is a nasty one, only bearable from lack of other employment and from the good wages earned. But there are plenty of men engaged in this work of killing animals for food who are much too good for the business. These will tell you openly that they dislike the job, but 'people will have meat,' and if they were to give it up, someone else would step into the work."^[18]

Again, subordinate to the actual butchery, there are certain disgusting, if not dangerous, occupations, such as that of the women who work in or near the cattle markets at the malodorous task of "preparing animal entrails for commercial uses," of which process the following account has been given:^[19] "The women's share in the ugly business begins when the greasy, slimy intestinal skins come to them for the scraping off of all fat and substance still attaching to them. They are washed, twisted up, dressed with salt, and are ready for the sausage-makers, on whose behalf they have been thus prepared." The journalistic comment is, that "in an ideal world men would not permit women to do work from which every instinct of refinement and even decency shrinks," but that all is over-ruled by "the demands of present-day cheapness." This, as things go, is undeniable; but it would be well that conscientious flesh-eaters should at least realise what their diet imposes on other people.

That, however, is just what they are mostly determined not to realise, doubtless from a subconscious apprehension that, if once they begin to look into this unsavoury subject, they may be pushed to the verge of certain awkward conclusions. Nothing is more significant than the extreme unwillingness of philanthropists and members of ethical societies, who debate almost every problem under the sun, to give serious attention to the question of butchery—a reluctance which may be taken as one of the strongest possible tributes to the pertinence of vegetarianism. This is said to be especially true of the philanthropists of Chicago—that great centre of the killing trade. "No one who goes to Chicago," says an eye-witness, "should fail to see the shambles. They are the most wicked things in creation. They are sickening beyond description. The men in them are more brutes than the animals they slaughter. Missions and institutes have been built in the respectable parts of the city from the profits, and the employees of the shambles have been left to go straight down to the devil.... It is the duty of everyone interested in social questions, of everyone whose demands necessitate this kind of labour, to wade through this filth to see these poor wretches at work."^[20]

And so they go their ways, the philanthropist to build "homes," the ethical folk to talk learnedly, and the social reformer to concoct schemes for the amelioration of the human race. Yet, meantime, these very persons are themselves perpetuating, by their mode of living, the evil conditions which they profess to be anxious to remove, and condemning the pariah slaughterman to a life of sheer bestiality. "The meat-eater," says Mr. Lester, "accepts the results of this man's demoralisation of character. Pious and professed Christians are content to allow the deep degradation of the nature of a whole class of men, set apart to do the nation's dirty work of slaughtering, without an apparent thought of the baseness of their conduct."

Here, as I said at the outset, is a distinctively human question, and one which cannot be evaded, even by those slippery reasoners who would shuffle out of the duty of humaneness to animals by pretending (in the face of evolutionary science) that there is no bond of consanguinity between the animals and mankind. By no possible sophistry can "educated" people be justified in placing this heavy burden of butchery on the hands of their social "inferiors." The vivisector and the sportsman have at least the courage to do their own devilries; and the work even of the hardened agents of "murderous millinery" and the fur-trade is diversified to some extent by travel and adventure. But the slaughterman's task is one of unrelieved, unmitigated brutality, involving the constant and systematic doing of deeds that are inhuman in themselves, degrading to the rough men who do them, and trebly disgraceful to the polite ladies and gentlemen at whose behest they are done.