Cincinnati, then, affords very slight and inferior facilities for holiday-keeping. We chanced to be in the city on the last Thanksgiving day, and were surprised to see seven tenths of all the stores open as usual. In the German quarter there were no signs whatever of a public holiday: every place of business was open, and no parties of pleasure were going out. The wholesale stores and most of the American part of the city exhibited the Sunday appearance which an Eastern city presents on this day; but even there the cessation of industry was not universal. And, after all, how should it be otherwise? Where were the people to go? What could they do? There is no Park. There are no suburbs accessible without a severe struggle with the attraction of gravitation. There are no theatres fit to attend. There is no "Museum," no menagerie, no gallery of art, no public gardens, no Fifth Avenue to stroll in, no steamboat excursion, no Hoboken. There ought to be in Cincinnati a most exceptionally good and high social life to atone for this singular absence of the usual means of public enjoyment; but of that a stranger can have little knowledge.
When we turn to survey the industry of Cincinnati, we find a much more advanced and promising state of things. Almost everything is made in Cincinnati that is made by man. There are prodigious manufactories of furniture, machinery, clothing, iron ware, and whatever else is required by the six or eight millions of people who live within easy reach of the city. The book-trade—especially the manufacturing of school-books and other books of utility—has attained remarkable development. Sargent, Wilson, and Hinkle employ about two hundred men, chiefly in the making of school-books; of one series of "Readers," they produce a million dollars' worth per annum,—the most profitable literary property, perhaps, in the world. The house of Moore, Wilstach, and Baldwin employ all their great resources in the manufacture of their own publications, many of which are works of high character and great cost. Recently they have invested one hundred thousand dollars in the production of one work,—the history of Ohio's part in the late war. Robert Clarke & Co. publish law books on a scale only equalled by two or three of the largest law publishers of the Eastern cities. Cincinnati ranks third among the manufacturing cities of the Union, and fourth in the manufacture of books. Here, as everywhere in the United States, the daily press supplies the people with the greater part of their daily mental food, and nowhere else, except in New York, are the newspapers conducted with so much expense. The "Cincinnati Commercial" telegraphed from Washington fourteen columns of General Grant's Report, at an expense of eleven hundred dollars, and thus gave it to its readers one day before the New York papers had a word of it. A number of this paper now before us contains original letters from Washington, New York, Venice, London, and Frankfort, Ky., five columns of telegrams, and the usual despatch by the Atlantic cable. The "Gazette" is not less spirited and enterprising, and both are sound, patriotic, Republican journals. The "Enquirer," of Democratic politics, very liberally conducted, is as unreasonable as heart could wish, and supplies the Republican papers with many a text. The "Times" is an evening paper, Republican, and otherwise commendable. Gentlemen who have long resided in Cincinnati assure us that the improvement in the tone and spirit of its daily press since the late regenerating war is most striking. It is looked to now by the men of public spirit to take the lead in the career of improvement upon which the city is entering. The conductors of the press here are astonishingly rich. Think of an editor having the impudence to return the value of his estate at five millions of dollars!
Visitors to Cincinnati feel it, of course, to be a patriotic duty to make inquiries respecting the native wine; and to facilitate the performance of this duty, the landlord of the Burnet House publishes in his daily bill of fare twelve varieties of American wine, from three States, Ohio, Missouri, and California. The cheapest is the Ohio Catawba, one dollar a bottle; the dearest is Missouri champagne, at three dollars and a half. The wine culture, it appears, is somewhat out of favor at present among the farmers of Ohio. A German family, many-handed, patient, and economical, occupying a small vineyard and paying no wages, finds the business profitable; but an American, who lives freely, and depends upon hired assistance, is likely to fail. A vineyard requires incessant and skilful labor. The costly preparation of the soil, the endless prunings and hoeings, the great and watchful care required in picking, sorting, and pressing the grapes, in making and preserving the wine, the many perils to which the crop is exposed at every moment of its growth and ripening, and the three years of waiting before the vines begin to bear, all conspire to discourage and defeat the ordinary cultivator. The "rot" is a very severe trial to human patience. The vines look thrifty, the grapes are large and abundant, and all goes well, until the time when the grapes, being fully grown, are about to change color. Then a sudden blight occurs, and two thirds of the whole crop of grapes, the result of the year's labor, wither and spoil. The cause, probably, is the exhaustion of some elements in the soil needful to the supreme effort of Nature to perfect her work. Nevertheless, the patient Germans succeed in the business, and sell their wine to good advantage to the large dealers and bottlers.
The Longworth wine-cellar, one of the established lions of the city, cheers the thirsty soul of man. There we had the pleasure of seeing, by a candle's flickering light, two hundred thousand bottles of wine, and of walking along subterranean streets lined with huge tuns, each of them large enough to house a married Diogenes, or to drown a dozen Dukes of Clarence, and some of them containing five thousand gallons of the still unvexed Catawba. It was there that we made acquaintance with the "Golden Wedding" champagne, the boast of the late proprietor,—an acquaintance which we trust will ripen into an enduring friendship. If there is any better wine than this attainable in the present state of existence, it ought, in consideration of human weakness, to be all poured into the briny deep. It is a very honest cellar, this. Except a little rock candy to aid fermentation, no foreign ingredient is employed, and the whole process of making and bottling the wine is conducted with the utmost care. Nicholas Longworth was neither an enlightened nor a public-spirited man; but, like most of his race, he was scrupulously honest. Indeed, we may truly say, that there is in Cincinnati a general spirit of fidelity. Work is generally done well there, promises are kept, and representations accord with the facts.
Every one thinks of pork in connection with Cincinnati. We had the curiosity to visit one of the celebrated pork-making establishments, "The Banner Slaughter and Pork-packing House," which, being the newest, contains all the improved apparatus. In this establishment, hogs weighing five or six hundred pounds are killed, scraped, dressed, cut up, salted, and packed in a barrel, in twenty seconds, on an average; and at this rate, the work is done, ten hours a day, during the season of four months. The great secret of such rapidity is, that one man does one thing only, and thus learns to do that one thing with perfect dexterity. We saw a man there who, all day and every day, knocks pigs down with a hammer; another who does nothing but "stick" them; another who, with one clean, easy stroke of a broad, long-handled cleaver, decapitates the hugest hog of Ohio. But let us begin at the beginning, for, really, this Banner Pork-house is one of the most curious things in the world, and claims the attention of the polite reader.
It is a large, clean, new brick building, with extensive yards adjoining it, filled with hogs from the forests and farms of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky. From these yards to the third story of the house there is an inclined plane, up which a procession of the animals march slowly to their doom from morning until evening. Here is the first economy. The thing to be done is, to transfer the pigs from those yards to the basement of the building, and, on the way, convert them into salt pork. They walk to the scene of massacre at the top of the building, and the descent to the cellar accomplishes itself by the natural law which causes everything to seek the centre of the earth. Arrived at the summit, the fifteen foremost find themselves in "a tight place,"—squeezed into a pen, in which they must remain standing from lack of room to lie down. There are two of these pens, and two "pen men"; so that the moment one pen is empty, there is another ready filled, and the work thus goes on without interruption. The fifteen animals which stand compressed, with their heads thrust upward, awaiting the stroke of fate, express their emotions in the language natural to them, and the noise is great. The executioner, armed with a long-handled, slender hammer, and sitting astride of the fence, gives to each of these yelling creatures his quietus by a blow upon the head. The pig does not fall when he is struck; he cannot; he only stares and becomes silent. The stranger who is unable to witness the execution has an awful sense of the progress of the fell work by the gradual cessation of the noise. We mention here, for the benefit of political economists, that this knocker-down, who does the most disagreeable and laborious part of the work, has the lowest wages paid to any man in the house. He does not rank as an artist at all, but only as a laborer. Readers of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill know why. When silence within the pen announces the surrender of its occupants, a door is opened, and the senseless hogs are laid in a row up an inclined plane, at the bottom of which is a long trough of hot water. One of the artists, called "the Sticker," now appears, provided with a long, thin, pointed knife, and approaches the pig nearest the steaming trough, gently lifts its fore leg, and gives it one easy, delicate, and graceful thrust in the throat. Along the trough, on each side of it, is a row of men, each with an instrument in his hand, waiting to begin; and apart from them stands the Head-Scalder, who ranks second in the corps, having a task of all but the greatest difficulty to perform. Scald a pig ten seconds too long, or in water twenty degrees too hot, and he comes out as red as a lobster; let the water be too cool, or keep the animal in it too short a time, and the labor of scraping is trebled. Into the hot water the hogs are soused at intervals of twenty seconds, and the Scalder stands, watching the clock, and occasionally trying the temperature of the water with his finger, or the adherence of the hair on the creature first to be handled. "Number One," he says, at length. By a machine for the purpose, Number One is turned over upon a long, declining table, where he lies smoking. At the same instant two men pull out his valuable bristles and put them in a barrel, and two other men scrape one side of him with scrapers. In a few seconds, these turn him over and pass him on to two other scrapers, who scrape the other side, and then slide him along to four other men, who trim and finish him, leaving not a hair upon his soft and quivering body. Then he falls into the hands of two "gamble-men," who insert a stick to keep the hind legs apart, and, by the aid of a machine, hang him up with his head downward. Next, the animal is consigned to the great artist of all, who performs upon him the operation so much in favor among the nobility of Japan. This artist, we regret to say, but will not conceal from a too fastidious public, is called "the Gutter." One long, swift cut down the whole length of the body,—two or three rapid, in-and-out cuts in the inside,—and the entire respiratory and digestive apparatus lies smoking upon a table, under the hands of men who are removing from it the material for lard. This operation, here performed in twenty seconds, and which is frequently done by the same man fifteen hundred times a day, takes an ordinary butcher ten minutes. This man earns six dollars and a half a day, while no one else receives more than four; and if he is absent from his post, his substitute, who has seen the thing done for years, can only perform it one fifth as fast, and the day's work of the house is reduced to one fifth of its ordinary production.
The long room in which the creatures are put to death, scalded, and japanned presents, as may be imagined, a most horrid scene of massacre and blood,—of steaming water and flabby, naked, quivering hogs,—of men in oil-skin suits all shining with wet and grease. The rest of the establishment is perfectly clean and agreeable. The moment the body of the animal is emptied, a boy inundates it from a hose, and then another boy pushes it along the wire from which it hangs on a wheel, and takes it to its place in the cooling-room, where it hangs all night. This cooling-room is a curious spectacle. It contains two regiments of suspended hogs, arranged in long, regular rows: one regiment, the result of to-day's operations; the other, of yesterday's. The cutting up of these huge carcasses is accomplished with the same easy and wonderful rapidity. The first that we chanced to see cut to pieces was an enormous fellow of six hundred pounds, and it was done in just one third of a minute. Two men tumbled him over upon a wagon, wheeled him to the scales, where his weight was instantly ascertained and recorded. Near by was the cutting-table, upon which he was immediately flopped. Two simultaneous blows with a cleaver severed his head and his hind quarters from the trunk, and the subdivision of these was accomplished by three or four masterly cuts with the same instrument. Near the table are the open mouths of as many large wooden pipes as there are kinds of pieces in a hog, and these lead to the various apartments below, where the several pieces are to be further dealt with. Gently down their well-greased pipe slip the hams to the smoking-department; away glide the salting-pieces to the cellar; the lard-leaves slide softly down to the trying-room; the trimmings of the hams vanish silently down their pipe to the sausage-room; the tongue, the feet, and every atom of the flesh, start on their journey to the places where they are wanted; and thus, in the twenty seconds, the six-hundred-pounder has been cut to pieces and distributed all over an extensive building.
The delivery of three finished hogs a minute requires the following force of men: two pen-men; one knocker-down; one sticker; two bristle-snatchers; four scrapers; six shavers (who remove the hair from parts not reached by the scrapers); two gamble-men; one gutter; one hose-boy; one slide-boy; one splitter (who fastens the animal open to facilitate cooling); two attendants upon the cutters; one weigher; two cleaver-men; four knife-men; one ham-trimmer; one shoulder-trimmer; one packer; six ham-salters; one weigher and brander; one lard-man; one book-keeper; seven porters and laborers,—in all, fifty men. The system therefore, enables one man to convert into pork thirty hogs a day. The proprietors of these packing-houses pay the owners of the animals sixty cents each for the privilege of killing them, and derive their profit from the refuse. The bristles of a hog are worth seventeen cents; his tongue, five cents; the hair and the fat of the intestines pay the entire cost of killing, dressing, and packing.
There is a moral in all this. In such establishments, a business which in itself is disgusting, and perhaps barbarizing, almost ceases to be so, and the part of it which cannot be deprived of its disgusting circumstances is performed by a very few individuals. Twenty men, in four months, do all that is disagreeable in the slaying of one hundred and eighty thousand hogs, and those twenty men, by the operation of well-known laws, are sure to be the persons to whom the work is least offensive and least injurious.
There are many other industrial establishments in Cincinnati that are highly interesting, but we cannot dwell upon them. One thing surprises the visitor from the Atlantic cities; and that is, the great responsibilities assumed in the Western country by very young men. We met a gentleman at Cincinnati, aged thirty-two, who is chief proprietor and active manager of five extensive iron works in five different cities, one of which—the one at Cincinnati—employs a hundred and twenty men. He began life at fourteen, a poor boy,—was helped to two thousand dollars at twenty-one,—started in iron,—prospered,—founded similar works in other cities,—went to the war and contracted to supply an army with biscuit,—took the camp fever,—lost twenty thousand dollars,—came back to his iron,—throve as before,—gave away twenty-five thousand dollars last year to benevolent operations,—and is now as serene and smiling as though he had played all his life, and had not a care in the world. And this reminds us to repeat that the man wanted in the West is the man who knows how to make and do, not the man who can only buy and sell. This fine young fellow of whom we speak makes nuts, bolts, and screws, and succeeds, in spite of Pittsburg, by inventing quicker and better methods.