The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle. — 1882-08-12 (Stourbridge, West Midlands, England)

ANOTHER STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Commenting upon the recent repeal of the Act relating to the burial of persons in reference to whose death a verdict of Febo de se has been returned, The Times has a leader, from which we extract the follow log: In the course of this Session something has been done to abolish an interesting fiction without much notice being taken of the fact. Parliament has found time to pass a short Act which will virtually put an end to a curious and venerable piece of absurdity. Coroners' juries have hitherto been constrained, in defiance of their oaths and in the teeth of facts, to find factitious verdicts in cases of suicides. There might be no reason to suppose that. the person whose death was the subject of investigation was really out of his mind at the time when he shot or drowned himself. The contrary might be perfectly clear, and the same jury would have unhesitatingly found him competent to make a will and generally responsible for his actions ; but, in order to elude a barbarous law, repugnant to most men's feelings, it was deemed right to resort to a pious fraud. The memory of a man guilty of suicide fared badly at the hands of our ancestors. All his goods were forfeited to the crown. His widow and children were rendered penniless, and the rights of his relatives were ignored. His body was denied decent burial. If all were done in order, the body ought to be ignominiously buried, with a stake driven through it, in a public cross road. From time to time we have cut out the grosser parts of this savage law. More than fifty years ago burial in a public highway was done away with. But the memory of the old view of suicide was kept up in the legal requirement that the body should be interred within twenty-four hours from the finding of the inquisition, and that this should be done between nine and twelve o'clock at night. We travel slowly in criminal legislation, and not until more than forty years afterwards did we abolish the practice of robbing widows and orphans for the purpose of punishing husbands and fathers. Deodands are also things of the past. Coroners' juries are not in these days required to assess the value of the waggon which crushed or the horse which kicked a man. Now we have taken another step in the right direction. The Act just passed does away with all the ignominious accwories to the burial of the remains of one who has committed suicide. The coroner need now only give directions as to the mode of interment, and that may be done in any of the ways prescribed by the Burial Amendment Act of 1880— that is to say, the burial may take place with or without religious service. The direction of the rubric that the Office for the Burial of the Dead is "not to be used for any who have laid violent hands upon themselves" remains in force. Otherwise, the motive for the compassionate verdicts of " temporary insanity" which coroners' juries have been accustomed to give is gone. They will not be obliged, in order to spare the feelings of the friends of a dead man, to record their opinion that he was a fool. Amiable perjury will not be among the duties of a juryman called upon to take part in investigating the death of some poor wretch by his own hand. The old law, the last shreds of which we have just thrown aside, wars undeniably brutal and harsh. It was a rough and coarse way of regarding suicide. It surrounded a hideous subject with artificial horrors: It shocked people who were not very easily shocked; it proved too much even for the not over sensitive generations which permitted our gaols to be true Infernas and the places in which the insane were lodged to be, if possible, something woure. It was an outrage to the living, and only wounded those who required consolation. Nor had it in all probability much effect in preventing suicide. A man who shuts himself up in a room and lights a charcoal fire, or loads a revolver, or purchases poison, with intent to destroy himself, is not likely to be deterred by the thought that his body may be refused Christian burial. Consuming, all pervading grief, melancholy wrapping a man round as in a cloud, "perpetual fume and darkness," as Burton, has it, the sense of depression and complete extinction both of hope and the power to hope, and all the other mental phases which precede suicide, do not permit the unhappy victim to think much of the proceedings super visum c,orporis in the future in the back parlour of a publichouse. Perhaps all that could be said in excuse of the brutal, blundering system, the last stick and stone of which have been removed, is that it was just as effectual for its purpose as any other. For ages moralists and clever men have been constructing aphorisms about the iniquity and meanness of self-destruction, and they sound very cogent in the ears of those who are quite satisfied with life as it is. Have they, however, ever arrested a single case of meditated self-destruction ! The man who is demoralized by a long train of misfortunes is not likely to pull himself together by taking a dose of the best apothegms. He is self. absorbed and is dead to the motives which would influence him in his better moments. Every "mad doctor" will assure us that those who are afflicted with suicidal melancholia appear to understand perfectly well the reasons which are urged against their infatuation ; but arguments glance off them without produc' ing any real impression. Their self-absorption grows and grows, regardless of external oircumstances, until they one day seek relief in suicide. If the unhappy man will not hear the simple, clear calls of nature and affection, he will be sure to be deal to the stranger, I more distant voices of preachers and moralists. He must be rescued, if at all, by elementary remedies ; and, if he be open to reason, there never was much danger that he would do himself harm. . . •