through the chilling rooms. First there were the "splitters," the most
expert workmen in the plant, who earned as high as fifty cents an hour,
and did not a thing all day except chop hogs down the middle. Then there
were "cleaver men," great giants with muscles of iron; each had two men
to attend him--to slide the half carcass in front of him on the table,
and hold it while he chopped it, and then turn each piece so that he
might chop it once more. His cleaver had a blade about two feet long,
and he never made but one cut; he made it so neatly, too, that his
implement did not smite through and dull itself--there was just enough
force for a perfect cut, and no more. So through various yawning
holes there slipped to the floor below--to one room hams, to another
forequarters, to another sides of pork. One might go down to this floor
and see the pickling rooms, where the hams were put into vats, and the
great smoke rooms, with their airtight iron doors. In other rooms they
prepared salt pork--there were whole cellars full of it, built up in
great towers to the ceiling. In yet other rooms they were putting up
meats in boxes and barrels, and wrapping hams and bacon in oiled paper,
sealing and labeling and sewing them. From the doors of these rooms went
men with loaded trucks, to the platform where freight cars were waiting
to be filled; and one went out there and realized with a start that he
had come at last to the ground floor of this enormous building.

Then the party went across the street to where they did the killing
of beef--where every hour they turned four or five hundred cattle into
meat. Unlike the place they had left, all this work was done on one
floor; and instead of there being one line of carcasses which moved to
the workmen, there were fifteen or twenty lines, and the men moved
from one to another of these. This made a scene of intense activity, a
picture of human power wonderful to watch. It was all in one great room,
like a circus amphitheater, with a gallery for visitors running over the