Of course I went to see the stock-yards, and my visit, as it happened, had something of a special character, for I saw a pig put through its performances in thirty-five seconds. A lively piebald porker was one of a number grunting and quarrelling in a pen, and I was asked to keep my eye on him. And what happened to that porker was this.[[1]] He was suddenly seized by a hind leg, and jerked up on to a small crane. This swung him swiftly to the fatal door through which no pig ever returns. On the other side stood a man—
That two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more,
and the dead pig shot across a trough and through another doorway, and then there was a splash! He had fallen head first into a vat of boiling water. Some unseen machinery passed him along swiftly to the other end of the terrible bath, and there a water-wheel picked him up and flung him out on to a sloping counter. Here another machine seized him, and with one revolution scraped him as bald as a nut. And down the counter he went, losing his head as he slid past a man with a hatchet, and then, presto! he was up again by the heels. In one dreadful handful a man emptied him, and while another squirted him with fresh water, the pig—registering his own weight as he passed the teller's box—shot down the steel bar from which he hung, and whisked round the corner into the ice-house. One long cut of a knife made two sides of pork out of that piebald pig. Two hacks of a hatchet brought away his backbone. And there, in thirty-five seconds from his last grunt—dirty, hot-headed, noisy—the pig was hanging up in two pieces, clean, tranquil, iced!
The very rapidity of the whole process robbed it of all its horrors. It even added the ludicrous to it. Here one minute was an opinionated piebald pig making a prodigious fuss about having his hind leg taken hold of, and lo! before he had even made up his mind whether to squeal or only to squeak, he was hanging up in an ice-house, split in two! He had resented the first trifling liberty that was taken with him, and in thirty-five seconds he was ready for the cook!
That the whole process is virtually painless is beyond all doubt, for it is only for the first fraction of the thirty-odd seconds that the pig is sentient, and I doubt if even electricity could as suddenly and painlessly extinguish life as the lightning of that unerring poniard, "the dagger of mercy" and the instantaneous plunge into the scalding bath.
Of the Chicago stock-yards, a veritable village, laid out with its miniature avenues intersecting its mimic streets and numbered blocks, it is late in the day to speak. But it was very interesting in its way to see the poor doomed swine thoughtlessly grunting along the road, and inquisitively asking their way, as it seemed, of the sheep in Block 9 or of the sulky Texan steer looking out between the palings of Block 7; to watch the cattle, wild-eyed from distress and long journeying, snorting their distrust of their surroundings, and trying at every opportunity to turn away from the terribly straight road that leads to death, into any crossway that seemed likely to result in freedom; to see for the first time the groups of Western herdsmen lounging at the corners, while their unkempt ponies, guarded in most cases by drowsy shepherd-dogs, stood tethered in bunches against the palings. All day long the air is filled with porcine clamour, and some of the pens are scenes of perpetual riot. For the pig does not chant his "nunc dimittis" with any seemliness. His last canticles are frivolous. It is impossible to translate them into any "morituri te salutant," for they are wanting in dignity, and even self-respect. With the cattle it is very different. But few of them were in such good case as to make high spirits possible, and many were wretched objects to look at. Dead calves lay about in the pens, and there was a general air of distress that made the scene abundantly pathetic. But, after all, it does not pay to starve or overdrive cattle, and we may confidently expect therefore, that in Chicago, of all places in the world, they are neither starved nor overdriven systematically.
The English sparrow has multiplied with characteristic industry in Chicago, but further west I lost it. I saw none between Omaha and Salt Lake City. So the sparrow line, I take it, must be drawn for the present somewhere west of Clinton. I do not think it has crossed the Mississippi yet from the east. But it is steadily advancing its frontiers—this aggressive fowl—from both sea-boards, and just as it has pushed itself forward from the Atlantic into Illinois, so from the Pacific it has got already as far as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is the price men pay for civilization. Only savages are exempt. Here in America, they have developed into a multitudinous evil, dispossessing with a high hand the children of the soil, thrusting their Saxon assumption of superiority upon the native feathered flock of grove and garden, and driving them from their birthright. They have no respect for authorities, and entertain no awe even for the Irish aldermen of New York. In Australia it is the same. Imported as a treasure, they have presumed upon the sentiment of exiled Englishmen until they have become a veritable calamity. So they have been publicly proclaimed as "vermin," and a price set upon their heads "per hundred." Indeed, legislatures threaten to stand or fall upon the sparrow question. Here in America, men and women began by putting nesting-boxes for the birds in the trees and at corners of houses; I am much mistaken if before long they do not end by putting up ladders against the trees to help the cats to get up to catch the sparrows.
I looked everywhere for "Chicago Mountain"—a New England joke against the Phoenix City—and at last found it behind a house at the corner of Pine and Colorado streets. They say (in Boston) that Chicago, being chaffed about having no high land near it, set to work to build itself a mountain, but that when it had reached its present moderate elevation of a few feet, the city abandoned the project. But I am inclined to think that this fiction is due to the spite of the New Englanders, who, it is notorious, have to sharpen the noses of their sheep to enable them to reach the grass that grows between the stones; for on looking at the mountain in question I perceived it to be merely a natural sand-dune which it has not been thought worth while to clear away. Further to acquaint myself with the city, I went into sundry "penny gaffs," or cafés chantants, and found them to my surprise patronized by groups of men sad almost to melancholy. It was the music, I think, that made them feel so. Its effect on me I know was very chastening. I felt inclined to lift up my voice and howl. But the intense gravity of the company restrained me, and I left. Yet I am told that inside these very places men stab each other with Bowie knives and shoot each other with revolvers, and are even sometimes quite disagreeable in their manners. But so far as my own experience goes I seldom saw a gathering so unanimously solemn. I might even say so tearful. It is possible, of course, that the music eventually maddens them, that it works them up about midnight into a homicidal melancholy. But there was no profligacy of blood-shedding while I was there.
They did not even offer to murder a musician.