The Sun.
London, England, 1845-03-21 00:00:00

After a few words from Mr. DENNISON, Mr. S.
WORTLEY, Sir G. GREY, and Mr. PARKER, the
motion was withdrawn.

After a short conversation between Mr. HUMS and
Lord LINCOLN, on the subject of lighting the House,
the report of the Committee of Supply was brought
up and received.

The Railway Clauses Consolidation Bill (Scotland)
was read a third time and passed ; and Mr. WAIELEY

having given notice of a motion for the production of
the Secretary of State's warrant, authorising the

opening of Mr. T. DuNcostnes letters, the house
adjourned at Twenty Minutes before Eight o'clock.

We have often directed public attention to the la-
mentable and fatal consequences to be apprehended
from the continued practice of interring human
bodies within the churches and in the burial-grounds
of the metropolis and other great towns. In advert-
ing to the "Reports of the Committee on the Health
of Great Towns," we have over and over again had to
deplore the fatuity which perpetuates a prejudice re-
suiting in consequences the most revolting and dis-
gusting to all the instincts of our nature, and in
defiance of the most awful visitations of infection and
disease that can visit on the living the most dis-
astrous reminiscences of the dead. It would be a
painful task to refer our readers to the tedious details
disclosed by witnesses to whose credibility no excep-
tion could be taken or was attempted to be hazarded.
But we may remark in few words that they esta-
blished the existence of a system of desecration of the
sanctuary of the grave in the churchyards, situated in
the most populous localities of our metropolis. The
custom of those to whom the care of these receptacles
of the last remains of mortality is confided by local
and parochial authorities, as well as by the common
law of the land, has evidently been to levy a guilty
revenue from the abuse of the functions invested in
them. The parties who have possessed the interest
in the land devoted to the reception of their corpses
who are summoned by the fiat of PROVIDENCE to re-
incorporation with the original dust from which their
primal creation was supplied, whether they have pos-
sessed the freeholds as ministers of the Establishment,
or of congregations dissenting from it in the multi-
plied forms which religious dissent has assumed in its
separations from our Church, have manifested equal
sordidness of feeling, equal obtuseness of sentiment,
and equally vivacious selfishness in making the
highest possible market of the superficial areas
and cubical capacities of the grounds that they had
thus to farm to the uses of the dead. In vain spotted,
malignant, typhoid fevers of various intensity.dis-
played the encouragement which was afforded by
such a state of things to their influences. The
horrors of such corrupting charnels, as those which
still disgrace the localities we have often indicated in
the neighbourhoods of Drury-lane, Portugal. street,
Cannon-street, and elsewhere, still exist. The Gol-
gotha of St. Clement's Danes Churchyard, to the
disgrace of the metropolitan police, the scandal of the
parish authorities, and the imminent peril of a densely
peopled vicinity, is still permitted to be opened for
the entombment of additional putrefaction into its
reeking and pestiferous bosom. It has been our duty
to show how the sordid avarice, and brutal, reckless
cupidity of the parties who commit these grievous

offences against the decencies of
_society and the in

stincts of-our common nature, hare endeavoured to

accommodate the capacities of the limited space under
their control to the unlimited, ever-increasing de-

mands of local mortality. Every fair and reasonable

inference that can be founded on the facts before the

public and on the discouraging results of compara-
tive mortality in the last year, embraced by the reports
of the Registrar-General, as compared with the pre-
ceding one, compels us to suppose that the latent

cause of aggravated and extended fatal disease is

really to be found in this still continued practice of
intermural interment. Were any further evidence
necessary to confirm such a deduction we should find
it in our police report for Wednesday last. At the
Clerkenwell office a poor widow, whose husband had
been buried in that enormous sewer of human de-
composition called the Spa-fields Burial-ground, in
the disgusting purlieus of which the people who reside
in Exmouth-street are content to breathe a tainted
atmosphere, appeals to the magistrate for advice.
Having read in the newspapers of the grave violations