MORAL DUTY TO BE KIND 239 



All honor to those great benefactors. "While it 

 is true that we as a nation have made slow progress 

 in educating people to believe that cruelty to an- 

 imals is a great sin, yet it is not so common now as 

 it was thirty or forty years ago. I remember when 

 quite young going into slaughter-houses, and wit- 

 nessing cruelties which have left an impression 

 upon my mind never to be forgotten. 



I do not believe that any man or woman of noble 

 sentiment and sympathetic nature, unless hardened 

 by familiarity with such sights, can look into a 

 slaughter-house and see the agonies, and hear the 

 dying groans, and see the display of trunkless heads 

 of calves, pigs, cattle, and sheep, and the bleeding 

 and partly flayed carcasses, or look upon the 

 blood-stained apron of the butcher in his shop, as 

 he uses his monstrous knife, without a shudder, and 

 a feeling of self-condemnation in being accessory 

 to this wholesale slaughter by using meat. In one 

 sense it seems vain to talk about this murderous 

 work being done humanely, and such are its effects 

 upon the sensibilities of people that in some States 

 butchers are not allowed to sit upon a jury in cases 

 involving the life of a criminal. Captain Bruce, 

 the celebrated traveler, relates scenes of cruelty in 



