Imatges de pàgina
PDF
EPUB

haustion 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 porkmaking 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, VOL. XX. NO. 118.

16

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 struke of fate, express their emotions in the language natural to them, and the noise is great. The executioner, armed with a longhandled, 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 remov-ing 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 today'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 cuttingtable, upon which he was immediately flopped. Two simultanous 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 smokingdepartment; away glide the saltingpieces 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 knockerdown; 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 slideboy; one splitter (who fastens the animal open to facilitate cooling); two attendants upon the cutters; one weigher; two cleaver-men; four knife-men; ene 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.

Churches flourish in Cincinnati, and every shade of belief and unbelief has its organization, or at least its expression. Credulity is daily notified in the newspapers, that "Madame Draskouski, the Russian wizard, foretells events by the aid of a Magic Pebble, a present from the Emperor of China," and that "Madame Ross has a profound knowledge of the rules of the Science of the Stars, and can beat the world in telling the past, the present, and the future." To the opposite extreme of human intelligence Mr. Mayo ministers in the Church of the Redeemer, and many of his wise and timely discourses reach all the thinking public through the daily press. The Protestant churches, here as everywhere, are elegant and well filled. The clergy are men-of-all-work. A too busy and somewhat unreasonable public looks to them to serve as school trustees, school examiners, managers of public institutions, and, in short, to do most of the work which, being "everybody's business," nobody is inclined to do. Few of the Western clergy are indigenous; it is from the East that the supply chiefly comes, and the clergy do not appear to feel themselves at home in the West. In all Cincinnati there are but three Protestant clergymen who have been there more than five years. The Catholic churches are densely filled three or four times every Sunday, and the institutions of that Church are conducted with the vigor which we see everywhere in the United States. Fortunate, indeed, are the Catholics of Cincinnati in having at their head that gentle, benignant, and patriotic man, Archbishop Purcell. It was pleasant to hear this excellent prelate, when he spoke of the forces of the United States in the late war, use the expression, "our army." Every bishop does not do so. It was pleasant, too, to hear him say, in speaking of other sects, "There are some things in which we all agree,

thank goodness." The Young Men's Christian Association is in great vigor at Cincinnati. It provides a readingroom, billiards, a gymnasium, bowlingalleys, and many other nice things for young men, at the charge of one dollar per annum. The Association here is said to be free from that provincial bigotry which, at Chicago, refused to invite to the annual banquet Robert Collyer and the young men of his church, because they were Unitarians.

-

And this leads naturally to the topic which interested us most at Cincinnati, - the happy way in which the Jews are mingling there with their fellow-citizens, and the good influence they are exerting. There are twelve thousand Jews in the city. Some of the large manufactories and mercantile houses have Jewish proprietors, who enjoy the social consideration naturally belonging to their position. The Jews are worthily represented in the government of the city, in the boards controlling public institutions, and in those which administer private charity. Several of the leading members of this respectable body belong to the class of men whose aid is never solicited in vain for a suitable object, and whose benefactions are limited only by their means or by their duty, never by unwillingness to bestow, and who value wealth only as a means of safety and education to their families, and of opportunity to bestow those advantages upon others. Christians in considerable numbers attend the beautiful synagogues, and Jews respond by going to Christian churches. And, O most wonderful of all! Jewish rabbis and Christian clergymen - Orthodox clergymen too, as they are ridiculously called — "exchange pulpits"! Here we have before us the report of a sermon delivered last March before a Congregational church of Cincinnati by Dr. Max Lilienthal, one of the most eminent and learned rabbis in the country. His sermon was an argument for perfect toleration of beliefs, even the most eccentric, provided the conduct and the disposition are what they should be.

"Religion is right," said he; "theology, in a great measure, wrong." Mr. Mayo and others preach occasionally in the synagogues, and find that a good Christian sermon is a good Jewish one also. We have, too, a lecture delivered by another rabbi, Dr. Isidor Kalisch, before the Young Men's Literary and Social Union of Indianapolis, which is bold even to audacity. He told the young gentlemen that the prevalence of Christianity in the Roman Empire was not an escape from barbarism, but a lapse into it. "As soon," said he, "as Christianity began spreading over the Roman Empire, all knowledge, arts, and sciences died away, and the development of civilization was retarded and checked." course any attempt to express the history of five centuries in twenty words must be unsuccessful. This attempt is but the boldness of the opinion does not appear to have given offence. The learned Doctor further gave his hearers to understand, that knowledge is "the source of all civilization," and theology the chief obstacle in its way.

Of

- a

It

The eyes of every stranger who walks about Cincinnati are caught by an edifice ornamented with domes and minarets like a Turkish mosque. This is the "Reformed Synagogue," of which Dr. Isaac M. Wise is pastor, highly enlightened and gifted man. is a truly beautiful building, erected at a cost of three hundred thousand dollars by one of the best architects in the West, Mr. James Keys Wilson, who also built the Court-House and PostOffice of Cincinnati. The interior, for elegance and convenience combined, is only equalled by the newest interiors of Chicago, and even by them it is not surpassed. Except some slight peculiarities about the altar, it is arranged precisely like one of our Protestant churches, and the service approaches very nearly that of the Unitarians who use a liturgy. It is the mission of Dr. Wise to assist in delivering his people from the tyranny of ancient superstitions by calling their attention to the weightier matters of the law. Upon

some of the cherished traditions of the Jews he makes open war, and prepares the way for their not distant emancipation from all that is narrowing and needlessly peculiar in their creed and customs. For the use of his congregation he has prepared a little book entitled "The Essence of Judaism,” from which the following are a few sentences, gathered here and there :

"It is not the belief of this or that dogma, but generous actions from noble motives, which the sacred Scripture calls the path of salvation." "The noblest of all human motives is to do good for goodness' sake." "The history of mankind teaches, that man was not as wicked as he was foolish; his motives were better than his judgment." "Reward or punishment is the natural consequence of obedience or disobedience to God's laws." "Great revolutions in history always resulted in the progress of humanity." "The first duty a man owes himself is the preservation of his life, health, and limbs." "The special laws of the Sabbath are: 1. To rest from all labor; 2. To recruit our physical energies by rest and innocent enjoyments; 3. To sanctify our moral nature; 4. To improve our intellect." "The best maxim of conduct to our parents is, treat them as you would wish to be treated by your children." "No offensive words or actions afford a shadow of justification for killing a human being, or injuring him in his limbs or health." "Only self-defence with equal arms, defence of others, or the defence of our country against invasion or rebellion, are exceptions to the above law of the Lord." "Domestic happiness depends exclusively upon the unadulterated affections and the inviolable chastity of parents and children." "Palestine is now defiled by barbarism and iniquity; it is the holy land no more. The habitable earth must become one holy land.” "The sons and daughters of the covenant have the solemn duty to be INTELLIGENT.” "Punishment must be intended only to correct the criminal and to protect society against crimes."

« AnteriorContinua »