The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-02-26
DISPOSITION OF THE DEAD
4 RESUME OF THE YARIOUS ALTER-
 NATIV Es TO BURiAL.

London Times Letter-A Remedy for Crowded Cemeteries inCrowded Cities Threatening tho Living and Excluding Them from Needed Residential Area.
 The following letter was sent to the editor of the Lopdon Times and printed in that journal:
 article on the overcrowding of ceme- teries and on the practice of cremation | as suggested alternative for 1t with 1 more concern if I had not at once per ceiVed that it had, as usual, been writ | ten under the influences of a great but very common mistake. This mistake | 1t is the interest of the cremationist propaganda to keep alive. AS matter | Of fact, however, if you will forgive my saying so, there Is no such thing as the overcrowding of cemeteries in the sense implied by the article in question-in the sense, that is, that more dead bod ies have been thrust into space in sufficient for their accommodation. A casual observer might, indeed, suppose, on seeing the surface of one of these cemeteries raised several feet above the surrounding level, that such had been the case. For all that he would be wrong, and doubly wrong if he sup l posed that cremation, or anything short of legal prescription, would af- feet the evil in any way whatever. The l upheayal he had noticed would not, in short, have depended on a plethora of i the dead, but on the massive and cost l ly furniture which the undertaken had been clever enough to impose upon us, and for the storage of which we had not been clever enough to see that we had provided him with a permanent place of deposit If it were only the dead that we were burying, any two or three of these cemeteries would, as l have shown, bury the whole mortality of London forever; meanwhile, as ex- perience has shown me that nothing short of the resume I am now sending you of the circumstances which have led up to it will ever make the singu- | larity of our position understood, I | have no choice, sir, than to ask you to give the necessarily explanatory re- sume insertion.
 The case, in short, is this: In 1899,
 
 less by 3,000,0O0 than it is at present, MT. Walker, member of the profess sion to which I belong, drew attention | to the overcrowded state of the city graveyards. At that time every church in the city-I am now speaking of the city proper-had it's graveyard in which burials had been going on since the fire, and as these were numerous and close together, it followed that no small DOT tion of the city ground was in the per- manent occupation of the dead. At that time, also, people who had busi- ness in the city lived in the city and shared with dead population, many times more numerous than themselves, the soil they lived upon, the water they drank, and the air they breathed. In 1S43 Edwin Chadwick, in a report on the same subject, confirmed the repre- sentations of MT. Walker; and at length in 1S4S-that is to say, five years after the issue of MT. Chadwick's report and nine years after the publication of MT
 Walkers book-the government, by the machinery of a board of health which it created for the purpose, closed the graveyards in question and forbade further interment within the walls
 Then in 1S54 having dissolved the board of health and sanctioned the opening by joint stock companies CD of new cemeteries outside the town, ii ceased all fuwrther action.
 Practically, therefore, beyond the fiction of forbidding, intramural inter- ments, and the opening of cemeteries outside the town to become in no long | ,a1, .o; +1.r n, they abandoned, the government did nothing; while so far as the recommen- dations of it's own board went, which all pointed to the necessity for legisla- tion, it disregarded them altogether
 Given the growth of a great living city it seems to have taken for granted that a great dead city must of necessi- ty grow up with it. In the city proper the dead having shouldered out the
 living, the living left and went to live elsewhere. The inhabitants of the sub urbs would have to do the same. The
 fault was in the great city. A genera
 tion would elapse before the new cen1-
 eteries would become full. The matter might, therefore, wait. But genera. tion did not elapse or anything like $
 generation, before the new cemeteries being already full, the whole question , cropped up again. The living popula.
 tion having increased by 3,000,000 the
 dead population increased in like pro.
 portion. And this was not all, because the tenure of the soil by the dead beins permanent and the rate of their in : crease over the living constant, tht , question of their disposal, already diff ficult enough, became out of all pro
 portion more difficult as time went on Meanwhile the problem to be solved 5 was always spoken of as "overcrowd ing" and the only remedy for it tht opening of new cemeteries.
 It was under these circumstance. that in 1875, impatient of position a once so helpless and so little creditabl, to us as practical people, and scarce
 ly less so of certain fanciful proposals l, , which were just then being put for ward for it's correction-I ventured t,
 advance the alternative of simple re
 liance on the provisions and prescrip tions of nature, and to promise, as . return for such reliance, a speedy ex trication from all our difficulties. For
 tified by the well defined cosmical lav i. which provides for 8 return to tn, earth of all organized being that liv,
 and die upon it's surface, pointed ou
 that by inclosing the bodies of tn | dead in hernPticallV sealed opf6pc xzr