THE OX IN LIFE AND DEATH i 19 



value save that which is conferred on them by the products 

 of the soil." 



Perhaps the time will come when India, with her three 

 hundred millions of men, will, in like proportion to our- 

 selves, slay her twenty-two millions of cattle ; but the time 

 is not yet. The sacred bulls still wander unharmed, the 

 oxen are the wealth of the people, and the milch kine their 

 dearest possession. 



And yet the Indian women are still mothers, indeed ! 



Here, in the West, where every large house is a gaping 

 mouth into which dead cattle are shovelled by the ton, and 

 where the cow, which has mothered our children, is fatted 

 up and sent to the butcher so soon as her milk supply ceases 

 to bring in its full pennyworth of profit, it would need a 

 Slaughter of the Innocents, indeed, to bring home to us the 

 vast debt of gratitude we also owe to the 



" Red skinn'd kine in the red tipped clover." 



