There Is A Mansion-And-
Brewery Suggestion About The Combination Which Seems Very Incongruous At
First.
But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water.
Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves,{footnote [The
Israelites are buried in graves - by permission, I take it, not
requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at
public expense.
The graves are but three or four feet deep.]} the town
being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the
living complain, and none of the others.
Chapter 42 Hygiene and Sentiment
THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a
resemblance to houses - sometimes to temples; are built of marble,
generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks
and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a
thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching
into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all
at once a meaning to him. 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 there would 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 would be 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 finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and
ugly but indestructible 'immortelle' - which is a wreath or cross or some
such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow
rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars - kind of sorrowful
breast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention: you just
hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care 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 changes of 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 been trying
all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot
accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental 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 with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must
die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when
even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long
career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It
is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have
now, after nineteen hundred 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 these miracle-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 find a 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 is always 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 with the
SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted."
'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through 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. Barton reported
that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two
per thousand - more than double that of any other. In this district were
three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than
three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity
of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease.
'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of
the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, THREE
HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence had been buried.
Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the
opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in 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 burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:
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