THE PARIS BUTCHERS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 2802, 28 June 1890, Page 6 (Supplement)

THE PARIS BUTCHERS.

A GRIEVANCE. O.vr.Y think of the Paris butchers going on strike at the termination of Lent, when their services wore most required, to allow lean-kine mortals to put up a little flesh after forty days of abstinence. They have not the excuse of the early French Henrys, who decreed capital punishment for those that duiing Lent exposed meat for sale, and thus tempted stomachs to commit iniquity. The question, so far as Parisians aro Concerned, will bo settled as usual by a rise in the prico of wheat; they have always to pay for tho music of strikes. But the slaughterhouse men, 700 in number, havo a griovance that involves the question of Protection, aud the latter is the pivot of homo politics, and of national finance. Under plea of cuttle disease, the Government prohibits the entry of live sheep into France for the Paris market. This includes 25,000 sheep weekly, representing a loss to trades—of killing, skiu, wool, offal—of sfr. per head. The sheep come chiefly from Germany, so the Germans kill the animals on the frontier, and send the carcases, after sanitary inspection by French vets, to Paris, in frigorific vans. The Paris abbiittuir men claim the killing of the sheep, as heretofore, by themselves, not on the frontier by Germans, If the carcase is sound for importation, the living animal cannot be diseased for for transport. So say we all of us. But the ultra-protectionists turn a blind eye to this logic—(Own correspondent).