). The implication is that we should love and worship
beauty. We should seek to surround ourselves by beautiful objects and
avoid that which is degrading and ugly.

Let us make some comparisons. Look at a collection of luscious fruits
filling the air with perfume, and pleasing the eye with a harmony of
colour, and then look at the gruesome array of skinned carcasses
displayed in a butcher's shop; which is the more beautiful? Look at the
work of the husbandman, tilling the soil, pruning the trees, gathering
in the rich harvest of golden fruit, and then look at the work of the
cowboy, branding, castrating, terrifying, butchering helpless animals;
which is the more beautiful? Surely no one would say a corpse was a
beautiful object. Picture it (after the axe has battered the skull, or
the knife has found the heart, and the victim has at last ceased its
dying groans and struggles), with its ghastly staring eyes, its
blood-stained head or throat where the sharp steel pierced into the
quivering flesh; picture it when the body is opened emitting a sickening
odour and the reeking entrails fall in a heap on the gore-splashed
floor; picture this sight and ask whether it is not the epitome of
ugliness, and in direct opposition to the most elementary sense of
beauty.

Moreover, what effect has the work of a slayer of animals upon his
personal character and refinement? Can anyone imagine a
sensitive-minded, finely-wrought _aesthetic_ nature doing anything else
than revolt against the cold-blooded murdering of terrorised animals? It
is significant that in some of the States of America butchers are not
allowed to sit on a jury during a murder trial. Physiognomically the
slaughterman carries his trade-mark legibly enough. The butcher does not
usually exhibit those facial traits which distinguish a person who is
naturally sympathetic and of an aesthetic temperament; on the contrary,
the butcher's face and manner generally bear evidence of a life spent
amid scenes of gory horror and violence; of a task which involves
torture and death.

A plate of cereal served with fruit-juice pleases the eye and
imagination, but a plate smeared with blood and laden with dead flesh
becomes disgusting and repulsive the moment we consider it in that
light. Cooking may disguise the appearance but cannot alter the reality
of the decaying _corpse_; and to cook blood and give it another name
(gravy) may be an artifice to please the palate, but it is blood,