sheep, lumped wholesale, at not less than two
pounds to three pounds a week, for which, of
course, his customers pay. Some persons
during the restrictions of the cattle plague
ignorantly proposed that all the supply of London
should be furnished by a dead meat trade. Even
supposing that our climate would permit the
importation and railway conveyance of dead meat
to take place in summer, autumn, and spring,
it would be an arrangement most injurious
to the interests of the working classes of
London.

The arguments against undue encouragement
of the dead meat trade, which also apply to any
unnecessary concentration of slaughter-houses
in the metropolitan market, are very well put
in a pamphlet issued in support of a market and
quarantine for foreign cattle on the Thames:

"There are powerful reasons why the dead
meat trade should receive no special encouragement
in London.

"London is not only the residence of the
most wealthy, but also the very poorest classes.

"Every day there arrives in London a small
army of poor labouring folks, who fly to the
metropolis as a city of refuge, where work of
some kind is always supposed to be, and
generally is to be, had. These people, many of
whom eventually arrive at a condition of
employment which is to them affluence, found,
before the advent of the cattle plague, some
compensation for the dearness of lodgings in
the cheapness of food, and especially of meat.
Under ordinary circumstances, London has the
cheapest food-markets in Europe, as compared
with average wages, for those who buy with
money in their hands. This cheapness in a
great degree arises from the facility with which
they can obtain all qualities of meat and what
is called the offal, but which, in reality, includes
some light, very nutritious, and even delicate
parts of the animals slaughtered, as well as
meat of varying qualities; for beef may be
wholesome without being the produce of Highland
Scots; and mutton from a Dutch or Merino
sheep will feed a family that cannot afford
Southdown legs or loins.

"The head and pluck, that is, liver and heart,
of a sheep is sold by large butchers for two
shillings; with the addition of a small piece of
bacon, it will make a nutritious and cheap
dinner for six or seven persons.

"Sheep's feet sold with the skin form a
considerable article of food.

"So, again, a bullock's head, worth three
shillings, and a heart worth two shillings, are
amongst the articles of cheap food in London.

"Every sheep and every beast slaughtered
on the continent of Europe, and sent dead to
London, is a sacrifice, not only of a considerable
amount of food kept back from the best
market, but of a quantity of raw material which
can be sold at a better price, and worked up
into manufactured articles more advantageously
in London than anywhere else. An increase of
dead meat trade not only deprives the labouring
poor of a supply of cheap animal food, but of
employment in making up the hides, skins, &c.,
into a manufactured article.

"A sheepskin is worth from ten shillings to
sixteen shillings. The feet that go with it
contain bones with which the handles of knives
are made. The entrails are manufactured into
a variety of uses. Even the blood, which is
usually the perquisite of the slaughterer, is
valuable to sugar-bakers and manure-
manufacturers.

"It must, therefore, be remembered, that
every beast and every sheep sent to London in
the form of meat, which formerly came alive,
involves a loss of fourteen shillings of valuable
material of food in a sheep, and of from forty
shillings to fifty shillings in a bullock.

"Philanthropic professors of medical science
too often forget that every restriction on the
movement and management of a manufactured
article is a tax. Restrictions may be necessary
—there are cases where they are
indispensable. The orders in council which
restricted the movement of cattle during the time
that the cattle plague raged, were a very serious
but essential and inevitable tax on meat. We
cannot afford in London to make meat unnecessarily
dear."*
* Why have a Foreign Cattle Market on the
Thames? By James Odams.

There are, however, many districts of the
metropolis where, from the value of the property,
it is not possible for private slaughter-houses to
exist; therefore it would be well, instead of trying
to centralise the killing business in the
metropolitan market for the especial benefit of the
public-house interest, to establish a sufficient
number of district slaughter-houses on the most
approved principles for light, drainage, ventilation,
water supply, and general arrangement,
with the special object of enabling the butchers
of each district to have as short a distance as
possible to traverse between the slaughter-
houses and their shops. These abattoirs to be
under the control of a public officer, but to be
let to each butcher for use at fixed fees, under
strict regulations.

The beast and sheep slain and dressed being
ready to be cut up, the selling process—
the most important of all—comes next. Here
at once arises the question of price. Why is
meat dearer than thirty years ago, in spite of
enormous importations from every stock-feeding
district of Europe—in spite of railroads, which
have facilited the supply to our great cities—
in spite of improvements in breeding and feeding,
which have diminished by one-half the
average time for ripening a bullock, and by
two-thirds the production of fat mutton?

The first cause is to be found in the improved
condition of the working classes all over civilised
Europe, and especially in this country—an
improvement first proved by an increased demand
for more meat and whiter bread.

"Forty years ago, many well-meaning people
wasted their time and money in circulating tracts
and giving lectures, for the purpose of teaching