There remains one fallacy of quite recent origin. An association has been formed--somewhat late in the day, it must be allowed--consisting of a few sanitary reformers, who put forward, also, humane reasons, for “Reform of the Slaughter-Houses,” one of the secondary propositions of which is, that the savagery and brutality of the Butchers’ trade could be obviated by the partial or general use of less lingering and revolting modes of killing than those of the universal knife and axe. No humanitarian will refuse to welcome any sign, however feeble, of the awakening of the conscience of the Community, or rather of the more thoughtful part of it, to the paramount obligations of common Humanity, and of the recognition of the claims of the subject species to _some_ consideration and to _some_ compassion, if not of the recognition of the claims of Justice; or will refuse to welcome any sort of proposition to lessen the enormous sum total of atrocities to which the lower animals are constantly subjected by human avarice, gluttony, and brutality. But, at the same time, no earnest humanitarian can accept the sophism, that an attempt at a mitigation of cruelty and suffering which, fundamentally, are _unnecessary_, ought to satisfy the educated conscience or reason. Vainly do the more feeling persons, who happen to have some scruples of conscience in respect to the sanction of the barbarous practice of Butchering, think to abolish the cruelties, while still indulging the appetite for the flesh luxuries, of the Table. The vastness of the demands upon the butchers--demands constantly increasing with the pecuniary resources of the nation, and stimulated by the pernicious example of the wealthy classes; the immensity of the traffic in “live stock” (as they complacently are termed) by rail and by ship,[2] the frightful horrors of which it has often been attempted, though inadequately, to describe; the utter impossibility of efficiently supervising and regulating such traffic and such slaughter--even supposing the desire to do so to exist to any considerable extent--and the inveterate indifferentism of the Legislature and of the influential classes, sufficiently declare the futility of such expectation and of the indulgence of such comfortable hope. It is, in brief, as with other attempts at patching and mending, or at applying salves to a hopelessly festered and gangrened wound, merely to put the “flattering unction” of compromise to the conscience. “Diseases, desperate grown, by desperate appliances are relieved, or not at all;” the foul stream of cruelty must be stopped at its source; the fountain and origin of the evil--the Slaughter-House itself--must be abolished. _Delendum est Macellum._