Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order.
When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it,to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down therewould live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead,they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter wouldbe the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers,in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults:
placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children,husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow findsits inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and uglybut indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or somesuch emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellowrosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowfulbreast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention:
you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will takecare of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can;stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron.
On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changesof color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation.
They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle;but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that.
I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have beentrying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinelysentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.
Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages,when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground,to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air withdisease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must diebefore their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now,when even the children know that a dead saint enters upona century-long career of assassination the moment the earthcloses over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought.
The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteenhundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.
But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics,within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial,MADE several thousand people sick. Therefore thesemiracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.
St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true;but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years,and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all;and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all.
Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you finda hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute.
And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound.
A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however;for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account isalways left unsettled.
'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote:
"The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases,results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters,with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also withthe SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted."'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surfacethrough eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do,and there is practically no limit to their power of escape.
'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Bartonreported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundredand fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other.
In this district were three large cemeteries, in which duringthe previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried.
In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed toaggravate the disease.
'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearanceof the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where,THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence hadbeen buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics,remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resultedin an immediate outbreak of disease.'--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO.
3, VOL. 135.
In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation,Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burdenis laid upon society by the burial of the dead:--'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals inthe United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes.
Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilitiesof all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year,and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business.
Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combinedgold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!
These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-groundsand expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciationof property in the vicinity of cemeteries.'
For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial;for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costlyand ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor,cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap[Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]>--so cheap untilthe poor got to imitating the rich, which they would doby-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muckof threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand,it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokesthat have had a rest for two thousand years.
I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavymanual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year,and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimpingis necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.
To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I waswriting one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.
He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin thatwas within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find,plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have costless than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.
He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.
Hygiene and Sentiment
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