If you wish to see an exemplification of the law of life, the survival of one by the failure and death of another, go some day to any one of the great abattoirs which to-day on the East River, or in Jersey City, or elsewhere near the great metropolis receive and slay annually the thousands and hundreds of thousands of animals that make up a part of the city’s meat supply. And there be sure and see, also, the individual who, as your agent and mine, is vicariously responsible for the awful slaughter. You will find him in a dark, red pit, blood-covered, standing in a sea of blood, while hour after hour and day after day there passes before him a line of screaming animals, hung by one leg, head down, and rolling steadily along a rail, which is slanted to get the benefit of gravity, while he, knife in hand, jabs unweariedly at their throats, the task of cutting their throats so that they may die of bleeding and exhaustion having become a wearisome and commonplace labor, one which he scarcely notices at all. He is a blood-red slayer, this individual, a butcher by trade, big, brawny, muscular, but clothed from head to foot in a tarpaulin coat and cap, which from long spattering by the blood of animals he has slain, have become this darksome134 red. Day after day and month after month here you may see him—your agent and mine—the great world wagging its way, the task of destroying life never becoming less arduous, the line of animals never becoming less thin. A peculiar life to lead, is it not? One would think a man of any sensibility would become heartsick, or at the least, revolted and disgusted; but this man does not seem to be. Rather, he takes it as a matter of course, a thing which has no significance, any more than the eating of his food or the washing of his hands. Since it is a matter of business or of living, and seeing that others live by his labor, he does not care.
But it has significance. These creatures we see thus automatically and hopelessly trundling down a rail of death are really not so far removed from us in the scale of existence. You will find them but a little way down the ladder of mind, climbing slowly and patiently towards those heights to which we think we have permanently attained. There is a force back of them, a law which wills their existence, and they do not part with it readily. There is a terror of death for them as there is for us, and you will see it here exemplified, the horror that makes them run cold with the knowledge of their situation.
You will hear them squeal, the hogs; you will hear them baa, the sheep; you will hear the grinding clank of the chains and see the victims dropping: hogs, half-alive,135 into the vats of boiling water; the sheep into the range of butchers and carvers who flay them half-alive; while our red representative—yours and mine—stands there, stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, that we who are not sheep or hogs and who pay him for his labor may live and be merry and not die. Strange, isn’t it?
A gruesome lab............