They Say Every
Englishman Goes To The Chicago Stock-Yards.
You shall find them
about six miles from the city; and once having seen them, you
will never forget the sight.
As far as the eye can reach stretches a town-ship of cattle-pens,
cunningly divided into blocks, so that the animals of any pen can
be speedily driven out close to an inclined timber path which
leads to an elevated covered way straddling high above the pens.
These viaducts are two-storied. On the upper story tramp the
doomed cattle, stolidly for the most part. On the lower, with a
scuffling of sharp hoofs and multitudinous yells, run the pigs,
the same end being appointed for each. Thus you will see the
gangs of cattle waiting their turn - as they wait sometimes for
days; and they need not be distressed by the sight of their
fellows running about in the fear of death. All they know is that
a man on horseback causes their next-door neighbors to move by
means of a whip. Certain bars and fences are unshipped, and
behold! that crowd have gone up the mouth of a sloping tunnel and
return no more.
It is different with the pigs. They shriek back the news of the
exodus to their friends, and a hundred pens skirl responsive.
It was to the pigs I first addressed myself. Selecting a viaduct
which was full of them, as I could hear, though I could not see,
I marked a sombre building whereto it ran, and went there, not
unalarmed by stray cattle who had managed to escape from their
proper quarters. A pleasant smell of brine warned me of what was
coming. I entered the factory and found it full of pork in
barrels, and on another story more pork un-barrelled, and in a
huge room the halves of swine, for whose behoof great lumps of
ice were being pitched in at the window. That room was the
mortuary chamber where the pigs lay for a little while in state
ere they began their progress through such passages as kings may
sometimes travel.
Turning a corner, and not noting an overhead arrangement of
greased rail, wheel, and pulley, I ran into the arms of four
eviscerated carcasses, all pure white and of a human aspect,
pushed by a man clad in vehement red. When I leaped aside, the
floor was slippery under me. Also there was a flavor of
farm-yard in my nostrils and the shouting of a multitude in my
ears. But there was no joy in that shouting. Twelve men stood
in two lines six a side. Between them and overhead ran the
railway of death that had nearly shunted me through the window.
Each man carried a knife, the sleeves of his shirt were cut off
at the elbows, and from bosom to heel he was blood-red.
Beyond this perspective was a column of steam, and beyond that
was where I worked my awe-struck way, unwilling to touch beam or
wall. The atmosphere was stifling as a night in the rains by
reason of the steam and the crowd. I climbed to the beginning of
things and, perched upon a narrow beam, overlooked very nearly
all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin. They had just been shot out
of the mouth of the viaduct and huddled together in a large pen.
Thence they were flicked persuasively, a few at a time, into a
smaller chamber, and there a man fixed tackle on their hinder
legs, so that they rose in the air, suspended from the railway of
death.
Oh! it was then they shrieked and called on their mothers, and
made promises of amendment, till the tackle-man punted them in
their backs and they slid head down into a brick-floored passage,
very like a big kitchen sink, that was blood-red. There awaited
them a red man with a knife, which he passed jauntily through
their throats, and the full-voiced shriek became a splutter, and
then a fall as of heavy tropical rain, and the red man, who was
backed against the passage-wall, you will understand, stood clear
of the wildly kicking hoofs and passed his hand over his eyes,
not from any feeling of compassion, but because the spurted blood
was in his eyes, and he had barely time to stick the next
arrival. Then that first stuck swine dropped, still kicking,
into a great vat of boiling water, and spoke no more words, but
wallowed in obedience to some unseen machinery, and presently
came forth at the lower end of the vat, and was heaved on the
blades of a blunt paddle-wheel, things which said "Hough, hough,
hough!" and skelped all the hair off him, except what little a
couple of men with knives could remove.
Then he was again hitched by the heels to that said railway, and
passed down the line of the twelve men, each man with a
knife - losing with each man a certain amount of his
individuality, which was taken away in a wheel-barrow, and when
he reached the last man he was very beautiful to behold, but
excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of individuality
was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been in
case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his
most cherished notions.
The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying.
They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were
so excessively dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, not
passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of such a one had
ceased to foam on the floor, such another and four friends with
him had shrieked and died. But a pig is only the unclean
animal - the forbidden of the prophet.
VI
The American Army
I SHOULD very much like to deliver a dissertation on the American
army and the possibilities of its extension.
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