The Sun.
London, England, 1846-08-07 00:00:00

43_: • virithr.g Aitit

LONDON, FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 1846.

Among the various means of materially improv-
ing the sanatory condition of our populace, none are
likely to produce such immediate benefit, whether
morally or physically, as the regulation of public
cemeteries upon a different system than the present.
So thoroughly convinced are we of this circumstance,
that we have never tired, nor shall we ever tire, of in-
veighing against the pernicious grievances incident
to the present arrangement, until it be altogether and
permanently abandoned, and one of an entirely dif-
ferent character substituted. Feeling thus earnestly
in regard to the precarious tenure of public health,
under the existing evils of burying-grounds NNithin our
most populous cities, we are heartily rejoiced toperceive
that Mr. MACKINNON has re mlled the serious atten-
tion of the Legislature to the subject, by moving for
the second reading of the Public Cemeteries' Bill.
We regard those Members of our representative
assembly with peculiar interest, and, we must acknow'

ledge, with a kind of paramount partiality, who
labour arduously and unostentatiously for benefac-
tions to their common country. Such men as these
we look upon as the most laudable and legitimate,
because the most retiring and the most hard-working
of our legislative patriots. They contemn the men-
tricious glories of faction; they may be classified as
among those who, on a large scale, "do good by
stealth, and blush to find it fame." As we re-
gard the fabrication of the sickle or the plough as
immeasurably beyond the marvellous inventors of
eurekas, and automata, and eccentric clocks, we re-
gard these abolishers of social scourges as of a
loftier renown than that acquired by the METTER..
mcns and the TALLEYRANDS, in the adroit and so-
phistical construction of treaties and protocols. How
much more advantage has been entailed upon succes-
sive generations by the first shoemaker, than by the
first worker in tinsel and lacquer ! Precisely ana-
logous are those descriptions of statesmen whom we
have particularised and contrasted. Again we repeat
our gratification at the revival of the ques-
tion of public burial-grounds by Mr. MAC-
KINNON. He has recognised the extraordinary
benefits that would accrue to the community by some
radical alteration in the present localities and the
other baneful concomitants connected with our
churchyards. Nor do the Ministers evince any
disregard to the necessity of such a change. From
the incidental observations of Sir GEORGE GREY we
are deeply rejoiced to see that it is the intention of
Government to incorporate with other sanatory mea-
sures now in preparation, some plan for an alteration
similar to the one proposed by the Hon. Member for
Lymington.
Mr. Macau/Now has, after the most approved
fashion of preaching and propounding, divided his
proposition into three distinct heads, all of them
likely to prove individual causes to a common effect.
First, he insists upon the necessity of preventing all
interments within the precincts of large towns, or
populous places; secondly, of speedily committing
the bodies of the poor to the earth, so as to lessen the
chances of the spread of pestilential disorders;
thirdly, of puttingsome limitation upon the charges of
undertakers and others, the like gloomy craftsmen, who
are at present enabled to impose upon their unwilling
employers by the most exorbitant charges. We
conceive that the foregoing classification is
judicious enough, as far as it extends, but we be-
lieve that there are other collateral requisites in this
reform which should have been distinctly specified,
and successively enumerated. With the prevention
of interments within towns should have been joined the
prevention of interments in the vaults of such sacred
edifices as are habitually used as places of public
worship, and thousands of which structures would
not come under the influence of the preliminary
clause of this Bill. Is it not contrary to common
sense, to imagine that sound health can be pre-
served in our rural districts, and contagi-
ous diseases avoided in the sequestered
hamlets of England, when every Sunday the coun-
try folks assemble together in their churches, some-
times as well suited for the reception of the
parishioners as a thimble to a quart of gooseberries ?
Can health of body and avoidance of contagious
maladies, we repeat it, be insured when a crowd of
these labourers assemble every Sunday in their
diminutive church and sit there for hours in the
broiling heat of summer, with the steam and stench
of mortality reeking up through the planks or tiles
of the floor from the decaying flesh of their brethren
in the vaults beneath ? Is it possible that
while breathing such a pestilential atmosphere
at periodical intervals, these people can preserve the
purity of their own blood, and the wholesome or-
ganisation of their " tissues ?" It is from such
monstrous and unnecessary evils as this, it is from
the inhalation of the vapours arising from animal
decomposition, it is from the living poor sleeping for
many successive nights in the same room with the
dead poor (and this particularly in the dense quarters
of our metropolis), it is from unwholesome earth of
our City grave-pits infusing a subtle poison into the
lungs of our civilians, that thousands of lives
are sacrificed every year, that the inhabitants of
our towns are proverbially of more debilitated
constitutions than the dwellers in the country, that
contagious disorders sometimes ravage the land and
decimate the population ; that 67,000 of our fellow-
countrymen were every year swept from creation by
endemic and epidemic diseases. To say that this is not
a matter requiring the resolute and speedy interposition
of Government would be folly and cruelty to the
last degree. All the washhouses and public baths,
and Sewerage Acts, and copious supplies of
water, and ventilation, and domestic drainings
in the world, can never ensure the natural
health of, or ward off unnatural maladies from,
a people living in an artificial state of society unless
the vestiges of mortality—in plainer words,
the rotting corpses of our fellow creatures—be re-
moved from the vicinity of their living and breathing
companions. And morally such a change would be
beneficial. There is something more consonant with
the divine, and tender, and moving thoughts upon
death, such as are evoked by Christianity—there is
something, we say, more consonant with those so-
lemn and beautiful thoughts in the green grass, and
the cowslips, and the night sky of a country
churchyard, than in the mouldering planks, the
greasy clay, and rusty bars of a city church-
yard. The tranquillity of the one is as
appropriate as the din around the other is detestable
and distracting. Rejoiced, as we should have been,
to see Mr. MACKINNON'S motion for the second reading
of the Public Cemeteries' Bill acquiesced in, we shall,
nevertheless, await in patience and hope the re-intro-
duction of the matter by the Government, under Lord
JOHN RUSSELL. Our patience in this particular will
be the more sincere as we continue sanguine that the
subject will receive the revision as well as the patro-
nage of the Administration.

We have perused the report of what passed at the
meeting, held in Conciliation Hall on Monday last,
with feelings of unmixed satisfaction. The antici-
pated presence of Mr. O'CoNNELL imparted a peculiar
interest to the proceedings, as it was known he had
left London for the express purpose of justifying his
conduct in the face of his enemies, and of offering
his counsel to the Association as to the course to be
pursued in consequence of the secession from its body
of Mr. S. O'BRIEN and his turbulent clique. Mr.
O'CONNELL has triumphed in every way. He found
ready to his hand, as soon as he set his foot upon his
native sh Ire, letters addressed to him by distinguished
men of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, admirably
calculated to strengthen his unflinching determi-
nation, by moral means alone, to succeed in re-
dressing the political ills of Ireland. The letter of
Dr. HIGGINS was at once seasonable and severe, but
not more severe than just. We cannot resist tran-
scribing the following extract :
" We have witnessed with sorrow the disgraceful scenes
that have lately taken place in Conciliation Hall, and have
felt the deepest indignation and disgust at the shallow
sophistry and flippant impertinence exhibited by the few
young men who so childishly style themselves Young Ire-
land. Do these persons already forget that all their import-
ance, if any they possess, is owing to your superhuman and
unbounded influence? Or do they imagine the whole country
will ever start up at their wild bidding ; throw moral force
and O'Connell to the winds; trample upon God's holy com-
mandments; violate their sworn allegiance to their gracious
Sovereign ; and, under the magic spell of puritanical rank
and Jacobin impiety, sally forth from their peaceable fire-
sides to be butchered in an unequal and fruitless contest?
Assuredly, if such be the expectations of the Young England
party, they must look on their fellow-countrymen as the
veriest idiots upon the face of the earth, whilst, at the same
time, they draw down upon themselves the scorn and laughter
of every
true repealer in Ireland."
The confidence of the Romish priesthood is, if
possible, increased in Mr. O'CONNELL by the
divergent tactics of the " physical force" party. The
unbounded influence which they exercise over their
respective and multitudinous flocks is beyond dis-
pute. The detestable doctrines broached by Young
Ireland compel every well-conditioned man to stand
aloof from them. Numerically, mentally, and
morally, then, these factious demagogues, and gun-
powder tyros, have happily placed themselves hors de
comb t.
vreadtiiccitnedat
ioans
much last week, and we rej that The split is irremediaoice ble. laVt
e ourp
has been justified. The Liberator boldly denounced
every seceder as a traitor, Mr. S. O'BRIEN excepted.
To him only did he leave open the door of repentance.
We know not what may be the future political career
of Mr. S. O'BRIEN. It would be difficult to foretel
it of the possessor of so vapouring a temperament.
Our hope is that Mr. O'CONNELL may live long to
guide his country to a safe redemption from the
oppression under which she has suffered. But, should

we be disappointed in this, we are persuaded that,
after what has occurred, his sagacity is too keen to
permit him to recommend the Member for
Limerick as a proper person to fill his
place. It is evident from the following sentence
in the letter already alluded to, from the Roman
Catholic Bishop of Ardagh, that a great moral respon-
sibility would attach to any such recommendation :
" I feel thoroughly convinced, if it were the will of
PROVIDENCE to warn you to-morrow oryour near
dissolution, the Irish nation would unanimously adopt,
as their political guide, that man alone whom you
would bequeath to them as worthy of their con-
fidence."

Mr. O'CONNELL broadly declared that the present
Government should have his strenuous support. " He
was convinced that so much good to the country was
never tendered by a Government, and so much pru-
dence and discretion were never so necessary on the part
of the people." Probably no man out of the Cabinet
knows better than Mr. O'CONNELL the outline
of the ameliorating measures for Ireland intended to
be introduced next session by the Government; and
certainly few men could compete with him in capa-
city for judging of their salutary efficacy. More-
over, no one is more fully aware than the Irish leader
of the folly of harassing a well•intentioned Adminis-
tration by any untoward demonstration of violent
conduct in Conciliation Hall : his present moderating
policy is, therefore, equally a proof of his wisdom,
and true patriotism. The imbecility of the rebellious
seceders, in having arraigned those repealers who
have accepted office, was felicitiously ex-
posed ; for either they were sincere or insincere, when
they upbraided Lord EBRINGTON for considering a
repealer disqualified from holding office. If sincere,
they should have praised the Government for remov-
ing the ban of exclusion, and have congratulated the
present recipients of office. But, as they have not
done this, but have, on the contrary, denounced them,
they have, independently of the impolicy of their
views, furnished indelible proofs of their former insin-
cerity. We have them here inextricably seated be-
tween the horns of a dilemma.

Conducted in the way in which the Association now
is, ruled over by such a master spirit as O'CONNELL'S,
fenced round with the most solemn declarations, that
by the action of the pure and unalloyed principles of
moral force only shall its energies be devoted to the
regeneration of Ireland, we see no reason to regret
its existence, because we are satisfied that, simultane-
ously with the realisation of equal rights to those
enjoyed by Great Britain, the Association will be
either voluntarily dissolved, or crumble into insignifi-