Current Topics

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXVIII, Issue 51, 20 December 1900, Page 1

Current Topics

47 HOME AND ABROAD.

London has, within the past few weeks, afforded a rare field of observation for those who are interested in that curious study which has come to be known as the philosophy of crowds. It was an opportunity such as has rarely been presented since the days when Lord George Gordon's fanatics held possession of London in 1782, and when the ' Carmagnoles des Royal istes ' was sung by packed mobs of human wild animals in the streets of Paris in 1793. The recent occasion in London scarcely warranted such an exhibition of the kinetic energy of a mob. Two thousand City Imperial Volunteers were returning from the war in South Africa. The gallant warriors did not, during any period of the campaign, happen to be in the vicinity of any serious fighting. They had but scant experience of the perils that do environ The man that meddles with cold iron, and only nine men out of their total of 2000 dropped under Boer fire in the sundry small skirmishes that occasionally enlivened the monotony of their leisurely marches across the veldt. The sublime tomfooleries in which London engaged on Mafeking day have enriched local slang with a word — ' to maffick ' — which may yet, like another historic word — to boycott — receive the dignity of citizenship of the Knglish tongue. But no single word appears to have been yet deviled to express the hideous chaos that held possession of the streets of the world's commercial metropolis when its own particular Johnnies came marching home. • » • The London correspondent of the Otago Daily Times gives a lurid description of the 'utter chaos and anarchy ' into which London was plunged on ' that discreditable day.' The city, he says, was ' delivered to the unrestrained licence and rowdyism of the lowest class of the population, with the result that more than 2000 people were injured, many very seriously, and several killed outright, while the final scenes were more than a foretaste of Pandemonium.' The principal thoroughfares were 1 defiled 'by a ' vast army of rowdies, male and female.' 'As the afternoon wore on, the crowd became wholly unmanageable. . . . Disorder and anarchy rode rampant. . . . The scene of desperate fighting and struggling and gasping humanity, the shouts of men and the shrieking of women made up a general experience one would be sorry to meet with a second time.' Military and police alike lost control of the mob, and narrowly escaped being forced into the Thames. This was the state of London when the sun was high. The horrors of the dusk and darkness are thus described :—: — Throughout the whole of that Monday evening and well into the small hours of the next morning 1 the main streets of London were paraded by vast mobs of drunken, hooting, yelling, blasphemous roughs and Hooligans, male and female, who insulted everyone they met, and often assaulted their victims as well. Numbers of respectable women who had to pass along the streets that evening were mauled and pulled about and kissed and slobbered by these ruffians, sometimes in full sight of knots of policemen, who Beemingly were afraid to interfere, or, perhaps, had been instructed not

TIGERS AT PLAY.

to do so, as it ia the fashion to be gentle with those foal wretohefl for whom hanging is too good and who one of these days will wreck and pillage London itself unless they be taken in hand betimea and taught what a cat-o'-nine-tails is for. . . . One of the saddest features to my mind in the obscene riot -of last Monday was the large number of drunken women and girls who took active part in the worst excesses. Mere girls of 15 to 20, grossly intoxicated, were among the vilest of the noisy and foul-tongued crew. Their special delight was to thrust filthy peacocks' feathers into people's faces, or to bang passers-by with bladders tied on sticks. Their least harmiul amusement waa the dancing of furious cancans or some other indecent gambols. Many of these unsexed females were quite respectable in drees and appearance. That fact made their conduct seem all the more horrible and revolting. * • * The noisy and fickle mob had gone out to huzza their throats hoarse in welcome to the City Imperial Volunteers. In the snapping of a gun it turned its dangerous energies to riot and violence and uproar. Two hundred and fifty years before the same streets were lined by another closely-packed mob of enthusiastic sight-seers waiting to welcome other conquering heroes home. It was in 1650. And Cromwell and his Ironsides were marching through the vociferous streets on his return from his campaigns in Ireland. Oliver understood the weathercock populace of his day better than the London police authorities understand those of the present day. 'What a mighty crowd,' somebody remarked to him. ' Yes,' said the grim old Puritan ; ' but if it were to see me hanged how many there would be ! ' The London mob is still the same old mob of Crotmvell's days, but bigger and more massive and with more of the devil in it, and more dangerous. ' Where it comes from,' says Dickens in his Barnaby Rudge, 'or whither it goes, few men can tell. Assembling and dispersing with equal suddenness, it is as difficu't to follow to its various sources ab the sea itself. Nor does the parallel stop here ; for the ocean is not more fickle and uncertain, more terrib'e when roused, more unreasonable, or more cruel.' Towards the close of 1898 a * Non-Treating Club' was formed in Chicago. It started with one member— a remarkably live one, by the way : one Mr. Monett, the founder of the association. In three months it had drawn into its net a membership of 60,000 men. It was not a total abstinence, nor even what is commonly called a temperance, movement. Its card of membership contains the pithy injunction : ' When you want a drink, take it, and don't imagine you will offend anyone by not asking eight or ten to join you.' Members pledged themselves simply to avoidance of the pernicious habit of treating— in colonial, ' shouting.' Well, one act of the flattery of imitation is worth a dozen morganatic compliments. A club or association on similar lines has been started in Australia. It is sorely needed across the water. Customs of this kind are described in the Old Law as the plague of wise men and the idol of fools. Members of the new association — to which we wish God -specd — will probably have to stand for some time the odium of the idolators of the old treating custom, and an abundant pelting with that variety of ' chaff ' which hits as hard and cuts as deep as sparrow-shot. But the movement deserves attention as an upstanding fight against a grave social abuse.

A NON-TREATING CLUB.

A BURNING CIUESTION.

Some twenty months ago Judge Kettle gave, at Palmerston North, a little homily on the prevalence of 'shouting' in New Zealand. He does not view the habit with very marked approval. So much, at least, we infer from his remark that it is • a foolish, stupid habit, and one of the curses of the country.' He at the same time expressed regret that some legislation could not be devised to stamp the custom out of existence. With all our reputation as a (relatively) temperate people, there are, even among the most moderate drinkers in this Colony few who have the courage to say ' no ' in answer to the customary phrase : ' Have one with me.' Some years ago — so the story runneth — a French immigrant, who was in a state of baptismal innocence as to English and colonial drinking customs, asked a New Zealand squatter : ' What must I say eef a man asks me to drink?' • Oh,' said the man of acres, « you just say " All right," or " Don't care if 1 do "—and just sail in.' ' Yes. But eef Ino want to drink ? ' The squatter cudgelled his brains for a few moments. Then he said : ' Well, Frenchy, you've fairly floored me this time. Never knew a man to refuse.' ' Bacchus has drowned more than Neptune.' So runs the Spanish proverb. A far-reaching non-treating organisation would save many a youth from looking too often on the wine when it sparkleth in the glass, and would do more for the cause of temperance in these colonies than a dozen regiments of prohibitionists. It would at least teach our young men to say ' no ' at critical moments and snap their fingers in the face of old and evil custom. And, after all, much of personal virtue and character - formation depends on the capacity to say ' no ' and mean it at the proper time. Early in 1898 Wellington had its burning question, when the local cremationists agitated for the erection of a crematorium by the rate-payers of the Empire City. A similar agitation is now bubbling in Dunedin in a small way, and has boiled over into the columns of the daily papers. Cremationists and anti-cremationists have been administering sounding thwacks to each others' polls, sometimes, it must be confessed, with the weapon of the court jester, sometimes with that of Sampson. To the great body of people cremation is both unsightly and repulsive. And, as usual in discussions on this subject, the supporters of the old primeval system are serenely confident that the strength of public opinion is, and long will be, too great to permit of any extensive change in the principle of returning the bodies of our race to the earth from which the Creator compacted them. * • • The subject has been debated in all the moods and tenses from the days of Julian the Apostate down to Sir Henry Thompson and Erichsen. Since 1874. over 3000 books and pamphlets have been written on cremation. They have searched the sanitary, legal, economical, and religious aspects of the question from Dan to Beer=.heba— and left it pretty well where they found it. During the discussions of the subject in Dunedin, as in Wellington over two years ago, the sanitary side of the question came uppermost, and the lingering putrefaction of earth-burial, as at present generally practised, was made the theme of strong, and we may add, generally wellmerited, condemnation. In other words, the abuses of earthburial have furnished the cremationists with the best plea for the propaganda of a mode of disposing of the dead which many barbarous nations abandoned when civilisation spread among them. The whole case against earth-burial hangs by practices which are accidental to it. We refer more especially to heavy and durable wooden and leaden coffins.vaults, brick graves, and, generally, to all attempts to shield the bodies of the dead from the dissolvent and disinfectant action of air and mother earth. Earth to earth burial (without coffins) was the usual method followed by the early Christians, and the long and crowded corridors of the underground cities of the dead that stretch outside the walls of Rome are to-day as sweet and free from evil odors as if their loculi were filled with the cinerary urns which became fashionable in pagan Rome in the days when the simple ways of the olden days had been abandoned and manners had become corrupt. • * • The era of strong coffins began in England in the closing years of the Second Charles. A remarkable judgment by Lord Stowell shows the strong objection with which the official mind of the period viewed this effort to secure an unnatural survival of the crude outward form of the corpse and vain resistance to the law of dissolution. The custom still endures — in the interests of the undertakers. The unnatural and unsanitary condition of bodies enclosed in coffins of lead or heavy wood or in brick graves was exemplified in a horrible way when the burial-ground of St. Andrew's, Holborn (London), was removed to make way for the present Viaduct. ' Little difference,' says a writer in the July Quarterly, 'as to condition could be peceived between the coffins of Charles ll.'s time and those recently used, or between the coffins which were of lead and those which were of wood. In the coffins which were intact, their contents were also intact, but unrecognisable. 'In

one part of the cemetery,' says another writer, ' was a plaguepit, where the bodies of the dead had been thrown in just as they had come carted from the neighboring street. Fear was abroad in the land, and there was no time to think of coffins. The result was that when the pit was opened the poor uncared-for corpses had wholly disappeared, enfolded in the. bosom of mother-earth, and through her embrace restored to the world as the elements of life. 1 * * * Those best versed in sanitary science are unanimous in holding that nothing more injurious than carbonic acid is given off by cemeteries. And for this the surrounding vegetable world has such a voracious appetite that it is instantly absorbed. The huddled corpses of the victims of the great bubonic plague of London were probably covered with a light top-dressing of only one or two feet of earth ! And yet their shallow and crowded sepulchre was never known to have served as a centre of infection. The same holds true of the old and narrow roofed cemetery of the Capuchins in Rome. There a thin covering of earth from the Holy Land closely embraced the coffin less forms of the dead. After a brief period of this true earth to earth sepulture, nothing but the clean, dry bones remained. These were disinterred and were placed around the rooms in niches, or they were separated and wrought into grotesque adornments for the walls and ceilings. The little cemetery was daily visited by the curious, or by pious people intent upon meditation on the last things. But king microbe does not seem to have molested them particularly, and some of the monks who spent hours daily in this anatomical museum lived to a great old age. Early in 1873 tne Prussian Government sent a secret commission to examine into the condition of the dead that were slain on the battlefields of the Vosges in 1870. The results are briefly summed up in the following words : ' In some cases as many as 800 soldiers had been hastily thrust into a shallow trench. And yet after an interval of two years the bodies had disappeared and only the bones and accoutrements remained. To this rule there was one significant exception : the dead officers had been buried in mackintoshes, and the result was very much as if they had been buried in coffins. To put the thing shortly : the decomposition of a body depends upon the porousness of the soil and coffin.' And the moral of it all is this: what we need is not the frying-pan or destructor method of disposing of our corpses and of those of our sisters and*our cousins and our aunts, but a reform of our funeral customs — the abolition of heavy wooden and leaden coffins, vaults, brick graves, and all attempts to retard the swift and wholesome action of the earth on the bodies of the dead. In other words, a return to the good old rule, the simple plan of flimsy, perishable coffins and earth to earth burial. * * • The legal objections to cremation have never been satisfactorily answered. Briefly, it would put a premium on crime by destroying evidence such as has, over and over again, brought to justice poisoners like Mrs. Webster, Mary Anne Cotton, and others such. Numerous instances in which murderers have been brought to justice through the exhumation of the lawfully interred bodies of their victims are given by the writer of the article in the Quarterly for July. Dr. Bond, of the Westminster Hospital, furnishes several cases in point. And he adds that he ' has no doubt that many persons skilled in the use of poisons would more frequently resort to them if it were not for the knowledge that their operations were liable to be handicapped by exhumation.' Dr. Braxton Hicks, one of the two experts examined by the House of Commons Commission, gave it as his opinion that a postmortem examination should be held on every body brought to Woking for cremation ; that it would be 'a criminal act ' to destroy a body without such inquiry ; that earth-burial is ' better from a sanitarj point of view ' than cremation ; that, in fact, 'in a sanitary point of view it is perfect ' ; that it tends ' absolutely in no way whatever to spread infectious disease " ; and that ' any statement to the contrary is a statement which is not warranted by fact.' The writer in the Quarterly points out that it takes two hours to turn a single corpse into its residuum of grey ash, and a whole working day to destroy half a dozen. From these figures we can roughly estimate the delay and the enormous cost of roasting to ashes the dead of a great ci ty. In the Vienna crematorium, the dead are treated like parcels of meat and grocery : they are shot through pneumatic tubes from the city to the roasting establishments. Under their present anti-clerical management the bodies of paupers and of the unknown dead in the great hospitals of Paris are first consigned to doctors and medical students. After they have been duly hacked and scarified and dissected they are returned to the hospitals, carted pell-mell to the Pfere Lachaise crematorium, dumped into the furnaces without religious rites — tothe number of some 27,000 a >ear. For Catholics cremation is strictly forbidden by decree of Pope Leo XIII., dated May 17, 1886. Curiously enough, about the same time a similar prohibition of cremation was issued to the Jews of Italy by the General Consistory of

the Rabbins at Turin. Those who give directions — after the manner of Edmund Yates and Dv Maurier — for the incineration of their bodies after death are deprived of the Sacraments before passing away and of Christian burial afterwards. Among the reasons which prompted this decree was the fact that cremation had been notoriously adopted by the Freemasons and other infidel associations of Continental Europe as a public expression of their disbelief in the doctrine of the resurrection and of the truer and higher life that lies beyond death and the grave. It is, of course, needless to remind our readers that the reduction of the body by fiie offers no impediment to its future resurrection, for God's almighty power can effect its reintegration whether it be merged in the earth from which it was taken, or devoured by wild beasts, or dissolved into gaseous elements by the action of a furnace. The catacombs of Rome were the receptacles of the ashes of some of the early martyrs. But a general feeling has during all times existed in favor of committing the bodies of our dead to the kindly earth. Christians have thus long tacitly expressed their belief that, in the Scripture phrase, our body is planted as a seed in the earth, out of which we hope it will rise on the last day to a glorious immortality. 'It is sown in corruption ; it is raised in incorruption ' (/. Cor., xv., 4.2). • « • The Church has never condemned cremation in itself. She permits, and even encourages, the burning or calcining of the bodies of the dead in times of pestilence, as the Jews did (Amos, vi., 10), and on battlefields, where great numbers of festering bodies corrupt the atmosphere. Her prohibition arises partly from the motive given above, partly from reasons connected with her ritual, her processes of canonisation and veneration of relics, but chiefly, perhaps, because she looks upon even a lifeless Christian body as something different in nature and destiny from the remains of a brute. It is not in every sense dead. Like Lazarus, it ' only sleepeth * — awaiting the hour of its resurrection. And she is convinced that our soulless bodies are treated with greatest respect when consigned to mother earth with placid face, with form unaltered, to await the great day when the dry bones shall clothe themselves again with human shape and in the flesh the newly risen creature shall see God its Savior.