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Justice Erie admitted that the book of prices prepared by the workmen appeared to be very fair and reasonable , and he thought it would have been better if the Messrs . Perry had accepted the offered mediation of the mayor . Under these circumstances it is difficult to perceive that the men have been logically convicted of any offence whatever , and it is to be hoped that , when they are brought up for sentence in London , the judges , perceiving the logical flaw in the process will quash the conviction .
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THE CRIMES OF PEACE . How many momentous questions of the day would be solved , for the day at least , by a good stirring war ! It is true that the prosperity of the last war time , so often vaunted by retrograde politicians , was not a genuine accumulation of wealth ; but it is equally true that the heavy debt which we have now to pay , is not the necessary incident of wars ; on the contrary , some of the most warlike nations and governments have not incurred debt . Pitt far excelled Napoleon in the building up of that national institution : we have found Whig Ministers
and peace add to the debt ; we do not remember that Charlemagne bequeathed a national debt to the fundholders of the next generation . It is quite true that the process of sound production was hindered or perverted by war , true that gross abuses were fostered in the contract and loan system , true that improvidence was stimulated to the highest pitch by a paroxysm of expenditure for which unborn generations have had to pay . It is equally true that in the next war England will not repeat the blunder of her intolerable self-sufficiency , and- undertake to pay the piper , in that deadly dance ; for all Europe . It is still more true that the next European war or succession of wars will probably be of a more self-supporting kind . Present
appearances indicate either a war of Emancipation for Peoples against Absolutism , or a war of Northern Absolutism against the ultra-civilized degeneracy of Western Europe . Is the day of the People coming when the universal suffrage of Knowledge and Industry shall prevail against crowned families and obsolete feudalism ? or , the Roman Empire having passed away , the Teutonic race having spent its energies , the Anglo- ^ axon race having culminated to the commencement of its decline , is the day coming for the hordes of Russia , whose pioneers are preparing the ground for her inarch in every quarter of Europe ? One or other of those wars the aspect of Kurope prognosticates : in either case the victor will acquire wherewith to pay the
piper . Meanwhile , happen how it might , war , we say , would release us , for the day at least , from some pressing and ugly questions ; and possibly those questions might recur at a time when we should be better able to deal with ( hem . Manifestly it would rid us of embarrassments like the question which Lord Talbot raised on Friday night—the redun
dancy of unemployed naval and military officers . Other unemployed classes would find something to do . The Protection which followed war , and the Free-trade which followed Protection , have brought our commerce and industry into positions excessively embarrassing , and almost forbidding a solution by direct or quiet means . A war , in the ordinary sense of the word , might supersede a commercial revolution or an industrial rebellion .
On Saturday , the Mornin < r Chronicle made a sudden onslaught upon Holy well-street , and summoned the Society for the Suppression of Vice to its duty in that behalf . This is an ugly subject . We do not defend Holy well-street , but we say that if , is simply the outward symptom , of a deep-seated disease , the causes of which we firmly believe are to be sought ; , by the light of present observation , no less than oi' history , in the enervations Of peace . The eflecl ; is aggravated in our day by a perverse morality , which , defying the light , of modern science no less than of old experience , seeks , not , to cultivate and
train the faculties , but , to repress some of them , to supersede others , and to alter the essential elements of our nature . Nelielling denounces * ' those wretched moralists who , the better to govern man , corrupt his nature nud banish everything positive from his actions so completely , that the people gloat on the appearance of u great crime that they may refresh themselves by the aspect of something positive . " Thwarted impulses , over-excited nerves , scanty opportunities , concentrated stimulants of crowded towns , the depravities of satiety or of the opposite extreme , desperato privation—all these iniluonccu daily aggravate that which to the bulk of
our population is the sweeping denial for the exercise of manliness , the increasing spread of that trading torpor which is miscalled peace . The most numerous classes of our population now present starved peasants , overworked and stunted factory hands , enervated shopkeepers , and over all , a gentry not practised in war , and becoming too numerous for real familiarity with the manly sports of peace . In England , by favour of peace , man is becoming a strictly domesticated animal—tame , torpid , and timid .
We write thus , not because we wish to persuade any part of the people of this country into a war , but because , believing the approach of war-time inevitable , we desire to see the public mind accustomed to confront the idea . It is desirable that we should understand its advantages as well as its dangers ; that we should not forfeit the best position by a timid procrastination of our own advance ; but that , by a hard y foresight , we should be able to take that course which will avoid the worst consequences and will conquer * the largest amount of good for mankind and for our country .
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THE HORRORS OF MODERN SEPULTURE . The form we idolize may become loathsome ; the features we now so delight to gaze upon will be come hideous to the sight and noisome to the senses . Our living nature revolts from the idea , and that it may not press upon our sense , we surround death with poetical forms . We dispose the cramped limbs of death with decency and care ; we place flowers in the bier ; we carry the body with solemn procession to the grave ; we hallow it with sacred offices ; we place on its bosom the verdant sod ; we raise the " storied urn or animated bust ; " we inscribe an epitaph , recording the virtues of the departed and our undying affection ; and we turn our back upon the grave , leaving it to be desecrated by the sextan ' s augur , as he " tries" the overcrowded ground , perhaps to be chopped up and burned , to clear the way for a new comer , or at least to be thrown up again to the light of daybefore that morning in hope of which it was consigned to the earth—perchance to travel about in dogs' mouths , or be carted away in unmannerly heaps to the purlieus Of the city .
Judging from our places of Sepulture no one could possibly give the English credit for respect towards the departed . That which meets the eye of the most careless passenger i-i bad enough ; but little do the majority of the people think of their vicinage to the most horrible scenes , nor of the death and disease which they continually breathe It needed the Asiatic Cholera to draw " the attention of the Legislature to the matter .
The report on the scheme for extramural sepulture , which the People knows by heart , proves that there is no modification nor adaptation of intramural interment which can possibly meet the occasion . London is so thickly populated , and houses abut so closely upon all the graveyards , that nothing but absolutely closing them for ever ought to satisfy the People or the Legislature .
Why does the public require to be dinned continually with the cuckoo cry that the placing of a dead body in a grave , and covering it with a few feet of earth , does not prevent the gases generated by decomposition , together with the putrescent matters they hold in suspension , from permeating the surrounding soil , and escaping into the air above and the water beneath . Mr . Leigh , a chemist of repute , states more than this : —¦ " If bodies
were interred eight or ten feet deep in sandy or gravelly soils , I am convinced little would be gained by it : the gases would find an exit from any practicable depth . " A new grave dug in a churchyard quickly becomes a perfect well of carbonic acid gas , distilled from the surrounding soil : and in this pit no light will burn , nor could animal life by any possibility subsist . Imagine the very water of the metropolis holding human Mesh in suspension . Yes , we wash our rooms , our persons , nay , absolutely drink , a solution of decomposed hiiuiau bodies * We breathe dead body : Dr . Playfair estimates the mass of dead atmosphere around us
"The aniounf , ol f »« se « evolved annually from the < Ir ««» mi > oHiuon of UI 7 corpHCH pur acre , which in very far short , of the number actually interred in tlu > metropolitan fjraveyardH , iH not Icks than Hf , 2 ol cub . o feet ; but „„ fia . OOO intormentH take plae .- ' annually in the mutropoliH , the iiniouiitof rubi-h emitted J « equal to 5 J , fi 72 , / iHO cubic feet , the whole of whi < h beyond what is absorbed by the soil , must panH into tho water below , t > r the atmosphere abovo . " Tiie chairman and surveyor of the Holboin and
of graveyards repose in a fancied security . The drains which communicate with the sewers waft the odour of putrescent mortality into the boudoirs of Hyde-park and the saloons of Belgravianay , it ascends to the very nostrils of-Royalty . Dr . Reid states that the " burying-ground around St . Margaret ' s Church is prejudicial to the air supplied at the Houses of Parliament , and to the whole neighbourhood ; that the noisome exhalations are observable at all hours of the night and morning ; and that in private houses as well as at the Houses of Parliament , he has had to make use of ventilating shafts , or of preparations of chlorine , to neutralize the offensive and deleterious
those who are happily removed from the vicinity Fmsbury division of sewers state , that " when the sewers come in contact with the churchyards , the exudation is most offensive ; the matter from the churchyards exudes through the sides of the sewers ; the adjacent waters will find their way through the walls of thes . e sewers , and will penetrate even through cement . It is impossible to prevent it •»! All classes of witnesses bear testimony that " the stench proceeding from some of the crowded and confined graveyards in the metropolis is frequently so great , that the residents in the neighbourhood are obliged to shut their windows for hours and days together . " But let not those who are hanoilv removed from the vi ^ inJtw
effects . The mode of burial in the metropolis—as indecent as it is subversive of morality—has acquired a frightful notoriety . Dr . Milroy describes how pauper interments take place : — *• A pit , or what is called a ' double grave , ' is always dug , and . is kept open ( boards only being laid over the mouth ) until it is filled with the due number
of coffins , and then it is closed up with earth—the last coffin lying within three or four inches of the surface . A grave of this sort will hold , if it be 14 feet deep , about 18 adult coffins , and as many more children . The next grave is opened close alongside of the one just filled , up , with no space of earth left between ; consequently the piles of coffins in the latter one , is very generally exposed in the act of digging the new grave .
Dr . Milroy saw one of these graves , twelve feet deep , at the bottom of which was an exposed coffin , interred there seven weeks before . The bodies are placed . one upon another , without a particle of earth between them . And anuther witness says he has " seen the most offensive greenish discharge running from the bodies . " Nor does the condition of the vaults offer one redeeming point in this horrible picture . Mr . Ashley , the Professor of Chemistry to the Polytechnic Institution , after asserting that the vaults he has visited are generally in a very disgraceful state , says : —
" That of St . Mary-at-IIill is in a condition that is a disgrace to any civilized nation . Here are placed some hundred and iifty coffins , in all possible positions , piled one above another—the lower crushed by the . weight of those above . The great majority are broken and decayed , the remnants of mortality falling out between the rows of coffins . In all but the newest coffins the external wood is decayed , leaving the lead exposed . It is of course impossible in these instances to ascertain whose remains they contain . Enormous cobwebs and fungi , with much dirt and
filth , render the inscriptions that remain illegible . Many of tho coffins consist of a mere shell of decayt'd wood , which on the slightest touch breaks i » powder and exposes the remains of the skeleton . The coffins are bo fragile , and the piles so much out of the perpendicular , that it is dangerous to approach verynearthem . In the two further corners large collections of bones are piled together , without any attempt at order or decency —a most revolting wi ^ ht . ' I ' " vault is not ventilated , and tho odour from decomposing flesh is extremely foul . "
And in such a fane , with reeking mortality <>" all sides , are people invited to worsiiip : to «! ' '" crowds and imbibe miasma sufficient to sow disease in the strongest , frame . There should |> i « no surprise that the delicate are so frequently ° ' ' powered and compelled to leave the church dun"g t he . service ? . Of I he influence all Ibis luis upon the mind * ' octtisio
and feelings of the people we shall lake " to speak in a future article , in this we have l »' ( - ricdly referred to the parts of the report wh' < : lj speak of the unhealthiness and indecency ol <| K present practice of Sepulture . The repo'l w : ' published more than a year ago . Another rej ><» j to the : $ ] st of December , I 8 . ) 0 , has only j" » t ;! ordered to be printed . Thus , in a question <»« w" " vital importance both in a sanitary and in " m 01 ' 1 point of view , does the people Miil ' er from »' uibitunl delay of the Covcmiiient . ' The Jioar « l ° Health would have grappled with the whole quCb
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754 ®!> £ % tatf $ t * [ SATURDAY , I ¦ — ¦ * * i . „„ ' I
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Citation
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Leader (1850-1860), Aug. 9, 1851, page 754, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1895/page/14/
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