The Government does not intend to allow cremation to be
practised in England without a discussion in Parliament, in which, apparently, the Home Secretary will take the adverse view. The people of Woking are furious because a Company has bought land in Woking Cemetery to set up a furnace for burning the dead, and on Thursday sent a deputation to Mr. Cross about it. The deputation had not much to say, their spokesman, the Hon. Francis Scott, being much too angry to be intelligible, and making a speech which was a sort of oath writ large. Cremation was un-Christian, un- English, a scandal, a disgrace, and the like, all of which showed Woking opinion, but not the demerits of cremation. The speech, however, drew from Mr. Cross the declaration quoted, and the advice that the Woking experiment should be prosecuted as a nuisance. There can be no doubt that, apart from popular feeling, which, as usual, is right in essence and silly in expres- sion, there is a serious objection of public polity to cremation. It would knock the system of Inquest to pieces, make poisoning much more easy, and perhaps facilitate grave cases of per- sonation. That difficulty does not arise in India, where the climate destroys identity almost as quickly as cremation does.
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