B938 <=> B940 [BTG XLII Beelzebub in America, p. 939]

“Slaughterhouse is the name there for a special place where three-brained terrestrial beings carry on the destruction of the existence of those beings of various other forms whose planetary bodies they are addicted to using for their first being-food, again owing to those abnormally established conditions of ordinary being-existence.

“Moreover, executing this manifestation of theirs in these special establishments, they even say and imagine that they do it from necessity and, as it were, in a perfectly what they call ‘humane way.’

“This said terrestrial contemporary very famous writer, the author of this book, rapturously described, as an ‘eye-witness,’ a, in his opinion superlatively well-organized, slaughterhouse of this same city Chicago.

“He described the perfection of its machines of every possible kind and its marvelous cleanliness. Not only, he wrote, does humaneness to the beings of other forms reach in this slaughterhouse the degree of ‘divinity,’ but even the machines are so perfected that it is almost as if a live ox is driven through a door at one end and some ten minutes later, out of a door at the other end you could get, if you wished, hot sausages ready to eat. Finally, he specially emphasized that it was all done entirely by the ‘perfected’ machines alone, without the touch of a human hand, as a consequence of which, as he said, everything was so clean and neat there that nothing could possibly be imagined cleaner and neater.

“Several years after reading that book, I chanced to read again almost the same thing about this Chicago slaughterhouse in a certain also serious Russian magazine, in which this slaughterhouse was lauded in the same way.

“And thereafter, I heard of this Chicago slaughterhouse from a thousand different beings, many of whom had been, presumably, eyewitnesses to the marvels they described.