6 THE MEAT FETISH.
where. I shall never forget the forbidding look of the place nor the lowing and bellowing of the kine concealed somewhere in its foul recesses. Where are our artists, that they can enjoy and edify themselves in their doges' palaces and academies of belle arti, with such a background to it all, and discuss beauty and colour over a table d'ôte dinner fresh from the shambles? Are they really so much more dainty and civilised than the old doges themselves, who used to feast while the rats gnawed their living captives in the dungeons below-stairs?
But there is a beauty in ugliness (if I may use a Hibernicism) whenever it reveals a wrong, and who shall say that it does not always do so? An evil deed ought to look ugly, and has no business to look anything else. There is no hypocrisy, at any rate, in ugliness, and hypocrisy is the worst sin, because it is the sin of pretended beauty. Ugliness can at least tell the truth, and in the case of the slaughter-house it tells a great truth, which, though we suppress it to the best of our ability, will utter itself louder and louder until we give heed to the fact that in butchering our fellow-animals we are indulging in a totally unnecessary cruelty. That butchery is cruel is so self-evident that it is hardly necessary to dwell upon the fact, and cruelty usually attends the life of the victim from the beginning. On the cattle-ranges of the West the animals are left to themselves all winter, the thermometer often falling to 40 degrees below zero, Fahrenheit, and the herbage being frequently buried in snow. A large number are expected to die from cold and starvation every year. They are transferred for thousands of miles on trains in the dead of winter or in the scorching heats of summer, left for hours and even days without food or water. Finally, at the abattoir they are received by men who have been drilled into machines, who must kill so many creatures to the minute, and who begin the process of skinning before life is extinct. In some cases death must be prolonged to make the meat white.
