Excerpt from The Golden Age Cook Book

Lately I have been in the city of Chicago-one of the greatest slaughter - houses of the world - where the slaughter men, who are employed from early morn till late at night in the killing of thousands of these hapless creatures, are made a class practically apart from their fellow-men; they are marked outby the police as the most dangerous part of the community; amongst them are committed most crimes of violence, and the most ready use of the knife is found. One day l was speaking to an authority on this subject, and I asked him how it was that he knew so decidedly that most of the murders and the crimes with the knife were perpetrated by that particular class of men, and his answer was suggestive, although horrible. He said: 'there is a peculiar turn of the knife which men learn to use in the slaughter-house, for, as the living creatures are brought to them by machinery, these men slit their throats as they pass by. That twist of the wrist is the characteristic of most crimes with the knife committed amongst our Chicago population.' That struck me at once as both a horrible and significant fact. What right have people to condemn other men to a trade that makes them so readily take to the knife in anger; which marks them out as specially brutalized - brutes amongst their fellow - men? Being constantly in the sight and the smell of blood, their whole nature is coarsened; accustomed to kill thousands of creatures, they lose all sense of reverence for sentient life, they grow indifferent to the suffering they contin ually see around them; accustomed to inflict pain, they grow callous to the sight of pain; accustomed to kill swiftly, and sometimes not even waiting until the creature is dead before the skin is stripped from it, their nerves become coarsened, hardened, and brutalized, and they are less men as men because they are slaughterers of animals. And everyone who eats flesh meat has part in that brutalization everyone who uses what they provide is guilty of this degradation of his fellow-men.

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