OFFICIAL PLAN OF EXTRA.MITRAL INTERMENT.
A GRA2Th social reform is set forth in the Report of the Board of Health on a General Scheme of Extramural Sepulture : will the half-minded statesmen of our day have the zeal and will, the might and the heart, to carry out the scheme ? Were it done, it would remove those barbarisms of which we have so strongly complained as disfiguring our social customs, and would our aspiration for a custom of sepulture suited to the scientific knowledge, the refinement, and the religious enlightenment of our day.*
We have given an outline of the scheme in another page : the nature and extent of the reform will 'be most clearly seen if we sum up the usage as it is and as it might be.
As it is. In the desolate abode of the poor, the dead remains among the living, crowded together; the heart siokens with help- lessness and lack of counsel; death is at first equivocal and uncer- tain, until decay becomes unequivocal and active, the principles of death and life waging war in presence. In the grief-stricken house of the rich, trading competition obtrudes its hateful aspect ; the undertaker seizes possession, and proceeds to -extort money -under terror of implying an odious charge of "disrespect for the dead? The corpse of the poor man is carried along the streets, perchance by a fuddled porter in black, and is jostled through the crowd. With ugly form and dowdy pomp, the "grand" funeral conveys the corpse of the rich through the heedless bustle of the streets, a gazingstock to idle curiosity. In a narrow yard, floored by a mass of mud and rotten flesh, in an atmosphere of dizzy, sickening stench, in a hole dug among extruded bones andmouMer- ing skulls, the poor man is deposited to rot with the rest. The rich man is bottled up in lead, till the case is surcharged with gases,—a fetid relic -moolling the efforts of mortality to arrest the decree of dissolution. Both rich and poor, shut away in lead and wood, in stone and clay, are preserved so long as they can rise, hideous material ghosts, to glide among their fellow creatures in noisome and pestilent exhalations. The resting-place of the dead is a nuisance and a mischief As it might be. The poor finds in the authorized medical officer a resort for • Speetator, December 29, 1849.
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