A POWERFUL PLEA EOR CREMATION.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 7, Issue 358, 20 May 1884, Page 5

A POWERFUL PLEA EOR CREMATION.

. . Tlie fallowing letter recently appeared in a London paper •. — Sir, — Now that the charge of {Sir James "Stephen has assured us that the practice of cremation is not illegal, provided it be so carried out as not: to be a nuisance ; that the Cremation Society of England is ready to place their crematiorinin at the disposal of those who desire to make use of it; and that the Bill of Dr Cameron to regulate the practice of cremation is to be brought before the House of: Commons next month, bach ed by such men as Sir Lyon Playfair, t- itJohn Lubbock,Mr Howard, and others it may interest your readers to know that the opposition of the Roman Catholic clergy has ceased, and that not only in Milan, where 130 bodies have been burnt in the past two years but in Rome itself, the practice is steadily on the increase. On the Bth of last month I was in Rome, and visited the Campo Santo there, the chief cemetery of the city, adjoining the Church of San Lorenzo, where the last Pope is buried. There in thiß public cemetery, a crematorium has been erected, and one of the attendants told me that in the previous four months forty {bodies had been burnt there. The building resembles a small cottage. There is no high chimney, and j the furnace is a very simple oven of firebrick. The fuel used is wood only, and at the cost of six francs an adult body is burned in about two hours. No visible soioke and nothing offensive escapes from the chimney, as it is ail consumed in a small coke fire at the lower part of the chimney, just as in the more perfect apparatus built for the Cremation Society of England. ! The attendant told me that at first the feeling was strongly against the new I practice, or rather against the recent revival of the old practice ; but that now he and others employed in the Campo Santo had expressed their desire that their own bodies should rather be burnt than buried. He said that the feeling in Rome against cremation would probably be less strong than in other places, because the modern Romans were so familiar with the columbaria and urns containing the charred remains of the old Romans, and that these were far less repulsive tban the decaying remnants in a burial-ground, or in the walled-up cells of the corridors in the Campo Santo. In all the etJ[&#t«Ewvs in Italy which I have visited — Genoa, Pisa, Florence, Bologr)a, Rome, Naples — the system of burialjis'the same. The poor are simpiy interred in the earth in the quadrangular spaces., surrounded by colonnades and chapels. The rich are covered up in vaults in chapels, or beneath the stone flooring of the arcades, or in niches aloDg the walls, one above the other from the floor to ceiling, in all cases going through a process (more or less rapid) of putrefactive decay. Soil and aspect affect the rapidity of the process ; but I was assured that about ten years is the period which must elapse before a body can be regarded as inoffensive or not injurious to the living. Compare thi? with the two hours required by the practice of cremation, and compare the Italian cemeteries with our own over-crowded hob-beds of corruption. In this metropolitan district, in the twenty five years 1859---1883, the deaths registered numbered 1,896,314. Of course the dead have been buried, and with scarcely an exception in and around London. Grant, that in ten years a body may become harmless — although I do not at all believe that it does so within twenty years in our soil and climate — can any imagination conceive the enormous mass of decaying animal matter by which we are surrounded ? Could any one be surprised at the outbreak of some devastating pestilence a hundredfold more destructive than the plague or black death of the middle ages 1 And ought not every sanitary reformer to aid in the revival of the ancient practice which would convert the existing cemeteries, so rapidly becoming sources of danger to the public health, into permanently beautiful gardens receptacles for vases and cinerary urns, which would encourage sculpture, mural decoration, and colored glass work • while in our country churches the ashes of the people might again repose in death near the scene of their work in life, perfectly harmless, instead of polluting the earth of the churchyard and the water drunk by the surviving people, or being carried far from their homes and places of worship to some distant cemetery, which before long must become overcrowded and pestilential. Public sentiment may for a time revolt at any innovation, but a very little reflection will bring most people to agree with part of the Bishop of Manchester's address on consecrating a new cemetery. He said — " Here is another 100 acres of land withdrawn from the food-producing area of the country for ever. . . In the same sense in which the ' Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath,' I hold that the earth was made, not for the dead, but for the living. No itelligent faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is affected by the ■ manner in which, or the time in which this mortal body of ours crumbles into ' dust." I know that other leaders oi L thought, not only in. the Church: of Eng- ' land, but in other Churches, and amongst ' Nonconformists, Bhare in these sentii jnents. — T. Spenceb Wells.