Butchers and slaughtermen perform a necessary task from which most of us would shrink, and it is both unbecoming and nonsensical to suggest intentional cruelty on their part. _I do not for a moment._ But I do say that it is the business of the law so to control the methods of slaughter as to obviate to the utmost all needless suffering, however unintentionally it may be inflicted. In the following brief summary of our want of system I am not dealing at all with the Jewish method of killing, for not being a Jew, I cannot pretend to be qualified to discuss a custom which appears to have been necessary hitherto to the peace of the Jewish mind. I only urge a people in some respects more humane than ourselves to search their consciences, and see if they can still endure this method. Neither am I speaking as to Scotland, which is ahead of us, having provided by the Burgh Police Act, of 1892, that where there are public there shall be no private slaughter-houses; and where—at all events in Edinburgh—they have abattoirs that compare, I am told, with the best on the Continent. The following is a rough outline of what at present seems good to a nation which prides itself on being at once the most practical and the most humane in the whole world:— A mixed system of private and public slaughter-houses—thousands of private slaughter-houses (some of them highly insanitary) alongside of a few municipally controlled abattoirs. No regulation that where there are public abattoirs there shall be no private ones; _hence_ great difficulty in making these public slaughterhouses pay their way. Inspection of private slaughter-houses, in spite of all the good intentions of local authorities and medical officers, admitted to be very inefficient in so far as condition of meat and method of slaughter are concerned. Supervision of public slaughter-houses much hampered by the present widespread custom of allowing butchers to send in their beasts with their own slaughtermen. No general statutory regulations as to method of slaughter. Model by-laws have been drawn up by the Local Government Board and recommended to local authorities—but they are not compulsory and have been as yet but sparsely adopted. Slaughtermen not licensed; nor—except in slaughterhouses directly controlled by a Government Department (such as the Admiralty)—required by law to be proficient before they commence slaughtering. These are the methods of slaughter we adopt at present:—