nutritious and more unwholesome—but he is only an _un_common counsellor,
so don’t mind _him_. In half a quarter of a mile’s length of
Whitechapel, at one time, there shall be six hundred newly slaughtered
oxen hanging up, and seven hundred sheep—but, the more the merrier—proof
of prosperity. Hard by Snow Hill and Warwick Lane, you shall see the
little children, inured to sights of brutality from their birth, trotting
along the alleys, mingled with troops of horribly busy pigs, up to their
ankles in blood—but it makes the young rascals hardy. Into the imperfect
sewers of this overgrown city, you shall have the immense mass of
corruption, engendered by these practices, lazily thrown out of sight, to
rise, in poisonous gases, into your house at night, when your sleeping
children will most readily absorb them, and to find its languid way, at
last, into the river that you drink—but, the French are a frog-eating
people who wear wooden shoes, and it’s O the roast beef of England, my
boy, the jolly old English roast beef.
It is quite a mistake—a newfangled notion altogether—to suppose that
there is any natural antagonism between putrefaction and health. They
know better than that, in the Common Council. You may talk about Nature,
in her wisdom, always warning man through his sense of smell, when he
draws near to something dangerous; but, that won’t go down in the City.
Nature very often don’t mean anything. Mrs. Quickly says that prunes are
ill for a green wound; but whosoever says that putrid animal substances
are ill for a green wound, or for robust vigour, or for anything or for
anybody, is a humanity-monger and a humbug. Britons never, never, never,
&c., therefore. And prosperity to cattle-driving, cattle-slaughtering,
bone-crushing, blood-boiling, trotter-scraping, tripe-dressing,
paunch-cleaning, gut-spinning, hide-preparing, tallow-melting, and other
salubrious proceedings, in the midst of hospitals, churchyards,
workhouses, schools, infirmaries, refuges, dwellings, provision-shops
nurseries, sick-beds, every stage and baiting-place in the journey from
birth to death!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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