Published by A. It is quite possible, indeed, to go through life without ever seeing one. At the present moment I can only recall three which have ever come into my field of vision. One was out in the country, in the midst of the beautiful intervale of New Hampshire. An ugly board shanty in the fields, with a pile of hideous offal at one side and a sickening stench to leeward, to us children it was like an outpost of hell in the midst of heaven, and we shunned it instinctively and turned our eyes away.
The second was the municipal abattoir of Alexandria in Egypt, for once built out in plain view of the railway, with melancholy strings of buffaloes and other cattle waiting their turn in front. Once I walked along the shore of the Mediterranean behind it, not far from the foundations of Cleopatra's palace, but I had to leap across rivulets of blood running down into that poetic sea, and the smell was almost overpowering, so that I never passed that way again.
The third slaughterhouse of my experience was, of all places, at Venice. 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.
