CLOSING OF THE CEMETERY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5693, 28 June 1879, Page 3

CLOSING OF THE CEMETERY.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NEW ZEALAND TIMES. Sib, —For the credit of Wellington T am glad that, at last, there seems a likelihood of effective steps being taken to close the present cemetery, for its existence presents the disgraceful anomaly, unparalleled in the Southern hemisphere, of a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, exclusive of the surrounding country populations, burying its dead iu a graveyard in the middle of the town, surrounded with human dwellings and the drainage flowing down on either aide of the residence of the Governor of the colony, as well as the most extensive public buildings existing south of the Line ; while the sewage empties itself into tho harbor alongside of the railway wharf and new passenger station. Not only by its position, but by the nature of its soil, the present graveyard is utterly unfitted for its purpose ; the soil is impervious clay, quite incapable of absorbing the products of organic decomposition, which find their exit either as noxious exhalations or as poisonous sewage. I have known in summer of a man digging a hole a couple of feet deep, and in consequence of tapping a horizontal fissure in the city strata, the hole filled in a few minutes with water so unutterably fetid that the individual was sent home sick and staggering with a raging headache, and was confined to his bed for three days. I have been also told by an old medical student that when the atmosphere has been still and muggy, in passing through the cemetery, he has distinctly felt the peculiar odour of the dissecting room. Besides this, there lurks another deadly danger to the community in case of the outbreak of any serious infectious epidemic; for it is well known that the viscera swarms with the specific disease germs which cause death, and their propagation is inevitable. Indeed I have for several years speculated on the unexpected determination of the seat of government from this cause ; because, while no sanitary precautions are used, if some infectious disorder appeared, and carried off two or three of the members of the Legislature, the survivors would adjourn to some other place, and who knows when they might return ? The Government has a right to close the present cemetery, and, to its honor be it said, has given a very distinct hint of its wish to do so to the City Council, and it is to be hoped now that no backstairs influence will be sufficient to prevent a most important public necessity being accomplished. Individual rights ought to be religiously regarded, but concessions to a morbid sentimentality, which would sacrifice the living at the shrine of the dead, should be sternly ignored.—l am, &c., J. A. A.