New Britain herald., 1917-02-24

have 'combed out the undertaking trade and taken most of the skilled
 grave d1ggers for another sort of 1 digging whose work is to save the young and brave and vigorous, and l not to dispose of the mere chemical 1 husks that all humanity become when their souls have quilted tenancy of l their perishable bodies."
 l The aforementioned, of course, is a condition of war Every man whose 1 istence of the nation must be taken
 away in times of stress. Consequent 1 ly in wartime funerals are not as 1 elaborate as in time of peace. The 1 nameless graves of the young heroic l who die on the battlefield cry out l against the pomp and ceremony that 1 attach themselves to civilian funerals,
 and the subsequent elaborateness of
 monumental design in the grave
 yards
 In England, they believe that re- form of funeral procedure is long overdue. The London Daily Mail be- l lieves that the reform will have to
 at once extend to compulsory crema- ton, and eventually to the wider and even more important consideration
 of the ever growing encroachment of
 cemeteries upon land needed for building or agriculture. This paper
 goes on to say that it is only matter
 of arithmetic to prove that the land
 occupied by the dead will some day rival in area the land occupied by the living.
 The problems of England, or Ger
 many, or Russia, any of the countries at war, are the problems which the
 United States must study at first hand. Otherwise. the United States
 will suffer as these countries have
 One of these problems Is the burying of the dead. Without believing with
 the radical of English that cremation should be made compulsory because 1t is the clean, simpler, sanitary method of doing away with the dead, we may we'll consider the other side of the question,-the mercenary end. Without believing that cremation is the most rational and hygienic means of disposal of the dead we may readily acquiesce in the belief that it is the least wastefu1 of money. Having admitted that, we must believe that the present method of conducting funerals in America is entirely too extravagant and that more simple rites should be exercised.
 The people of Americia, with the people of other lands. are, indeed, tied to the wheel of custom. But it is written in ecclesiastical law that they must bury the dead;" there is no mention of cremating the dead. It Is true that large sums of money
 and all their melancholy trappings
 and corteges; but this will probably
 continue until the people see the light. The dead should be buried; but 1 without too much spomp. There
 were heroes at Bunker Hill, and Ap- pomattox and Gettysburg who never courted a tombstone, who never cared
 what marked the spot on which they fell, so long as they died for their
 country. The same is true with the
 warriors on the battledelds of Europe.
 In all the long, drawn disposal
 that we make of our dead-that cruel
 stress to those they leave behind of
 the three or more days lying in the
 house of bereavement, the bidding of black-garbed mourners from far and
 near, the Joiner and carpenters ephemeral and costly preservation of
 that which is unpreservable, the grav-
 en brass, the massy handles, the slow
 stepping procession, the lingered-upon last parting, the heavy waste of
 recording stone-there Is only one
 ritual that concerns the imperishable soul; it Is the beautiful burial service of the church. The rest is organism and ugly barbarism.
 As we learn from London "The
 men at the front have death around them every day in it's cruellest, un-
 ripest visitation; they are soldiers and sextons too. But they will tell you that all the dead of field of battle are easier to look upon than one death in a civilian home. On the field of 1 battle they look on a dead comrades s | body as the shell his glorious soul 1 has departed from-the mere coin he
 has given for his passport into the
 immortality of the gallant. They
 hold him in remembrance no less for | his swift bestowal and his shallow
 niche while the padre reads the only l ritual that matters"