l, and set
Fast trust upon the hands which murder them."

If the cruelty and injustice to animals are nothing to us, we have still
another argument to offer--the brutalization of the men who slaughter
that we may eat flesh. Mrs. Besant, in "Why I Am a Food Reformer," says:

"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 out by 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 I 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 continually 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._

"If I may not appeal to you in the name of the animals--if under
mistaken views you regard animals as not sharing _your kind of
life_--then I ap