But after all, the one great argument for a fleshless diet is the humanitarian one, and it does not seem possible that persons exist to-day who do not know of the horrors of cruelty which take place hourly, in order that meat may be eaten by men and women who could not look without sickening at the process which has made possible the roast upon their tables, but who are nevertheless the employers of every fainting child in the stock-yards, and every brutalised man in the shambles, whose wages they pay with every pound of meat they buy. The real butcher of an animal is the one for whom it receives its death blow, not the one who actually deals that blow. A man who recently visited some stock-yards writes: "We were sorry to see the Thor man make mislicks at a pretty heifer. His first stroke did not fell her, and she staggered and looked at him so wonderingly and pathetically. He could not strike her while her head was in that position, and after giving her two or three more ineffectual blows, she looked at him so reproachfully, as if pleading, 'Why do you treat me so cruelly? What have I ever done to you?' Finally he got her down and out of her misery. I shall never take a bit of steak on my fork without seeing that pretty heifer lifting her stunned head to that awkward pounder." Perhaps nothing more revolting than this same writer's remarks anent pig-killing has been written, but since the words are accurately true, they should be fit to read, for if the words which tell the truth about meat as food are unfit for our ears, the meat itself is not fit for our mouths. He describes the pig-sticking, the skinning, and the process which makes the pig into pork, and then adds: "He goes into the cooling room, and the whole effort from that time is to keep him from crumbling back into dust, attacked by worms. Salt and brine and smoke and cold prevent the corpse from utter dissolution. The refrigerator is a sort of Purgatory where the brute stays until he finally finds a cemetery in the human alimentary canal." Yet this man expects to again have meat "on his fork"! The "Cosmopolitan" calls attention to the remarkable procession daily passing through a certain slaughter-house, as follows: "Imagine a procession of 10,000 cattle marching two by two, in a line fifteen miles long; let 20,000 sheep follow them, bleating along twelve miles of road; after them drive sixteen miles of hogs, 27,000 strong; then let 30,000 fowls bring up the rear, clucking and quacking and gobbling, over a space of six miles; and in this whole caravan, stretching for nearly fifty miles and requiring two days to pass a given point, you will see the animals devoted to death in the packing houses of ---- & Co. in a single day. Surely a Buddhist would think that the head of that establishment had much to answer for. Never before in the world's history was a massacre of the innocents organised on such a stupendous scale or with such scientific system."