than unhappy in its tendency.

How shocking it must be to the inhabitants of Jupiter, or some other
planet, who had never before witnessed these sad effects of the ingress
of sin among us, to see the carcasses of animals, either whole or by
piece-meal, hoisted upon our very tables before the faces of children of
all ages, from the infant at the breast, to the child of ten or twelve,
or fourteen, and carved, and swallowed; and this not merely once, but
from day to day, through life! What could they--what would they--expect
from such an education of the young mind and heart? What, indeed, but
mourning, desolation, and woe!

On this subject the First Annual Report of the American Physiological
Society thus remarks--and I wish the remark might have its due weight on
the mind of the reader:

"How can it be right to be instrumental in so much unnecessary
slaughter? How can it be right, especially for a country of vegetable
abundance like ours, to give daily employment to twenty thousand or
thirty thousand butchers? How can it be right to train our children to
behold such slaughter? How can it be right to blunt the edge of their
moral sensibilities, by placing before them, at almost every meal, the
mangled corpses of the slain; and not only placing them there, but
rejoicing while we feast upon them?"

One striking evidence of the tendency which an habitual shedding of
blood has on the mind and heart, is found in the fact that females are
generally so reluctant to take away life, that notwithstanding they are
trained to a fondness for all sorts of animal food, very few are willing
to gratify their desires for a stimulating diet, by becoming their own
butchers. I have indeed seen females who would kill a fowl or a lamb
rather than go without it; but they are exceedingly rare. And who would
not regard female character as tarnished by a familiarity with such
scenes as those to which I have referred? But if the keen edge of female
delicacy and sensibility would be blunted by scenes of bloodshed, are
not the moral sensibilities of our own sex affected in a similar way?
And must it not, then, have a deteriorating tendency?

It cannot be otherwise than that the circumstances of which I have
spoken, which so universally surround infancy and childhood, should take
off, gradually, the keen edge of moral sensibility, and lessen every
virtuous or holy sympathy. I have watched--I believe impartially--the
effect on certain sensitive you