The Sun.
London, England, 1846-10-19 00:00:00

John Russell to tell the country what he infers from
these premises.
HERALD.—By man's unhallowed instrumentality,
" requiescat in pace" has been turned into mockery.
There is no peace for mere humanity, even in tl:e grave.
Day after day, from one end of the metropolis to another,
the awful plague-cry seems revived in a modified form—
" Turn out the dead, turn out the dead." The spirit of
D.:foe seems to hover over London, and to glory in im-
pelling its authorities to realise and renew some of the
horrors of his semi-fictitious narrative. A powerful im-
pulse eviscerates our churchyards. Some insane rest-
lessness summons old and young—the mouldering
skeleton of the last century and the fresh corpse of the
present month—huddles them all together, and carts
them off to Kingsland or to Battle-bridge. One day
a trader in death who battens upon burials is found
to cram his dark and putrefying receptacle until
it bursts with repletion--the next, a city church-
yard or a pauper burial-ground] is irreverently
disembowelled, the grave renders back its dead, and
the accumulations of 3 ears are transported to
a distance. Sex and age, social condition and
personal identity, are utterly confounded. The ideas
generated by such a picture may be painful and irritat-
ing,—tlie mere perusal of such a desecrating decription
may be at once awful and disgusting; hut what are
these compared with the reality of its performance?
A skull in the waste grounds at Islington, an arm at
King's cross, a foist at St. Giles's, a trunk at St. Pan-
! eras, the remainder any where, horror and loathing
everywhere. The latest exhibition we chronicled on.
' Thurseay. If the workhouse at St. Giles's requires en-
largement, the dead pauper makes way for the living.
An infirmary, a dispensary, a casual ward, waiting-
rooms, bath-rooms, and other offices being required, the
pauper churchyard is allowed by mere inadvertence to
furmish a site. Some old sheds are demolished, and Its
the foundations for the new buildings are gradually ex-
cavated, the ghastly remains of defunct humanity are
extensively uncovered. Fetid gases are liberated in a
state of powerful concentration—the diffusion of aerial
foulness proceeds h the unchangeable rapidity which
physical laws prescribe and natural science reveals—the
miserable tenements of surrounding poverty are per-
meated with the odours of putrefaction—and the cham-
bers of the half-starved mechanic are filled with the ele-
ments of typhus. Public indignation echoing the whispers
of conernisn propriety, which could scarcely fail to rise on
their own lips, at length compelled the guardians of
the poor to exhibit some amount of decency. The ex-
humated remains, we learn, were sent for reinterment
to the St. Giles's Cemetery, in the St. Pancras-road, in-
stead of being any longer diffused in the rubbish of waste
lands, to become the playthings of itinerant infancy.
But after what fashion was this compromise with their
duty effected? Black boxes, of any convenient size or
shape, into which we are told some twenty bodies were
indiscriminately thrust, furnished the machinery of trans-
portation. In the meantime the excavation makes pro-
gress, and the evolution of pestiferous gases proceeds
apace. If the more! sense and decent feelings of hu-
manity recoil at the history of this loathsome transaction,
we earnestly trust that the consequences of its publicity
will be neither temporary nor personal. Under the cir-
cumstances, it may be asked what could the authorities
at St. Giles's do, beyond that which they have effscted ?
The answer is manifestly this—suspend or abandon
this excavation of the dead to make room fur the
living pauper. Our complaint is, not that St. Giles's
workhouse and its churchyard are worse than other
places, but, what is far more important, that other places
are no better than St. Giles's. If a man builds a house,
nay, if he erects a wall, or removes a partition, thp
Buildings Act and its public officer era instantly on his
back. A heavy fine teaches him that individual rty
must yield to public safety. But what district surveyor
interferes with the ploughing. and probing, and disturb-
ance of churchyards ? What officer of health exists en
whom a notice of impending desecration could be served?
What public functionary augments the speed, and main-
tains the decency of some imperative removal of the
dead, when that lamentable necessity arises ? There
is, in truth, no such person. Why we are so ill
provided let our lawmakers answer ; with them the
disgrace rests—with us the disgust remains. " The
hcnour generally due unto all men," says Hooker,
" maketh a decent interring of them to be conve-
nient, even for very humanity's sake :" how much more,
then, are we called upon to disinter them decently.
What right has any body of men to aggravate the horrors
of dissolution ? The unimaginative minds of the vast
majority of our population inseparably associate death
with burial, but it has been reserved for the present
generation to connect the ideas of dissolution with the
indefinite terrors of wholesale body-snatching. The
3forgue and the Catacombs of Paris are as nothing com-
pared with the unblushing deeds committed in London
churchyards. In a city where so little outward respect
is exhibited for the human form in a condition of phy-
sical decay, men still wonder that amongst
the lower orders living brutality is rife, and
crime _is invested with no terrors. With what

excusable scepticism must the ignorant and the
dissolute regard the doctrine of a future state
and a superintending Providence, when they see that
which was just now the residence of an immortal
soul become the object of unrestrained insult and revolt-
ing desecration—when the funeral rites are scarcely for-
gotten, the mourning garment scarcely worn out, before
thisl rites become a mockery, and that garment a dis-
gusting reminiscence. Sorrowing relatives remember
that they laid the mortal remains of their lost friend in
the grave of his fathers ; can they say the next week
where those remains are tilt n ?—even the dead travel.
But the voice of public opinion, if once roused, will be
found to possess no temporising utterance ; the groan
from noisome prisons met the ear of Howard not in
vain ; the iron fetters of slivery encountered the eyes of
Clarkson not bootlessly the spirit of military flogging
quailed under the gaze of an independent press ; and the
desecration of the dead, if encountered with one tithe of
the same earnestness and determination, will expiate its
atrocities with equal certainty and completeness.