Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1915-01-11
MILLIONS OF DEAD
POISON THE LIVING
Europe Vast Burial Ground-san
Francisco Has Ordered All Bodies
Removed From the City-Communal
Mausoleums.
pv VANCE THOMPSON
U1HE dead have been ordered out Of
il Franclscn.


is not one excuse for permitting the dead to
poison the home of the living. New York
city is dotted over with cemeteres-from the
dingy and ancient graveyerds that lie hidden
in the streets and alleys of the lower town
TO the huge squares where the dead are
"parlSed" on the heights Of upper Broadway.
| only last year did the Legislators take
| hand They passed law forbidding the
| establishment of new cemeteries in Greater
New York and the adjacent counties
! westchester Richmond, Nassau and Rock
land. In the meantime the old cemeteries are
being rapidly filled. The problem What
to do with the dead?" will have to be faced
ere long
The latest statistics are to the effect that
every "a hours world over 10000 people die.
! They confirm the old popular theory that
there is a death every second Day in and
! day out, every time the second hand ticks
! some one dies. Gt is a more cheerful corol-
! larry that every second is born) And
| the dead crowd the living They lie thick in
| the cities. They throng the valleys and pre-
| empt the hills. They seize upon the fairest
| Sites and for them the most beautiful land
scapes are reserved. And obscurely they
mingle with the flowing streams and the
running waters.
And we drink the dead
What will Europe be after this war7
The earth is sown with the dead; through
the rottng earth the dead hands reach up to
pull the living down-dead pestflential hands.
Valley of Dead
In corner of northeastern France there
is a valley; when / saw it few months ago
the trenches spread network across 1t and
many of the trenches were already filled.
valley in the sunlight; and 1t was where they
put the British dead. Thousands upon thou
sands of them; men of the Connaught
Rangers and the Dublin Fusilers, men from
Kent and Sussex and Yorkshire, Gordon
Highlanders; I do not know how many are
there now. The day was there the dead ar
rived in long professions. The living stood
by and presented arms. A priest, his robes
revealing the khaki beneath said: "The
Lord hath given, the Lord hath taken away"
Brass trumpets sounded the Last Post"
Somewhere a dog howled. The living pre-
sented arms about turned and went away.
French peasants shoveled in the clods of
earth over matter that was already running
darl5ly back to the mineral kingdom.
And there the dead lie. They lie under a
thicket of small, wooden crosses, with rudely
painted names. officers and the men they
led to DEATH and among them lies 'Ethel
Fearney, of the Red Cross" a girl who died
in vain.
How many dead, think you, have been stuffed
into the ground? A half million? A million?
It Is hard to get precise figures. You may be
sure that more than you dare estimate have
been put to earth-soldiers and civilians, and
the lean, starved corpses of Belgium. And
each one of those uncounted dead, as he
darkens underground, is planning his revenge
upon the living. AS he lies there he has al
ready begun to poison the springs Of life He
is taking his vengeance on those who slew
him, on the innocent and on those who
are not yet born.
Did 1t need this war-this monstrous thing
born of hate and arrogance and greed-to
teach us the simple fact that the dead are
potent for evil?
What goes out of man when he dies I
know not; but what he leaves behind know
and all the inexpressible degradations of
the material garment he walked the world In.
It may not be our business that Europe has
poisoned the wells of the living with the
awful dead-though I think we should have
word to say-but undoubtedly we should
see in 1t a warning and a lesson.
West Ahead of East
AS have intimated, the West is ahead Of
us, who are dwellers in the tents of the East,
In this melancholy matter of dealing with
what the dead leave behind them when they
go otherwhere. They have, at least in some
places evicted the dead from the house OF
the living And 1t was in the West that there
arose the system of community mausoleums,
which is the second best solution of the
problem. Il say second best, for all sane
thinkers admit that the best way to dispose
Of the corpses that fan to right and left OF
us-one a second-is to burn them wholly
with hre) Those Western reformers saw
that a law OF horrible inequality lay over the
dead The rich man lay in a marble and
bronze mausoleum. He was shielded from
helminth and scarabaeus. The poor man was
fed to the worms, So, to give the boon OF
equality to the dead they began. in CO.
operative way, to build community mauso-
| leums.
The plan was exactly that of the home
building associations, which are 80 efficient
In the West. They paid in their funds little
by little In time the mausoleum was built;
and the thousand members Of the associa-
ton each had a crypt in the mighty build
ing, where his desiccated body, wrapped in
a leaden shroud, might lie to eternity. The
idea spread very rapidly. Today there are
$50 such organizations and they have vir-
tualIy completed all their mausoleums. The
hrst to be erected in the East, am informed
were those of Bufralo and Syracuse. A New
| York community" has been formed and a
mausoleum is to be erected on Staten Island
Twelve hundred members have combined to
make this place of the dead a possible thing.
| A crypt in the mausoleum costs member
| from 5000 up-in perpetuity; and for the
member who is content 10 give to his ashes
the faetitlous immortality of a funeral urn
the cost Is much less The plan is a good
one The evidence lies in the fact that It is
| spreading rapidly over the country. These