INFECTION GLEBE.
Everybody knows that an intramural churchyard has a tendency to enlarge itself—not in area, but in perpendicularity. It is in every sense a rising concern, and it swells like an investment at compound interest. The attraction of mortality increases in a ratio multiplying with the increase of the mass—and what is there to prevent so deadly a nuisance from being immediately abolished? Hear the Bishop of London in his evidence given before the Lords' Committee on the Great Extramural Cemetery Bill—opposed by the Lord Bishop:—
"I wish, in a very few words, to explain that, when the bill was first printed, the clergy were much alarmed. They saw that it would interfere with the establishment of parochial burial grounds, and they objected more particularly to the small amount of compensation fees which the company intended to pay, viz., 1s. 8d. for the open ground, and 2s. 6d. for the brick graves and vaults."
In the country it is a common thing to see sheep grazing in churchyards, but in London, by the account of the Bishop, the same pastures afford food to the shepherds. To the eye of chemists—who are ghost-seers—for ghost and gas "are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations"—what a picture is presented by a metropolitan incumbent praying at his reading desk against pestilence with the cause of it steaming up all around him in the shape of sulphuretted hydrogen, for the generation of which he is principally responsible! By all means give the intramural clergy compensation for the loss they may sustain by extramural cemeteries, though the poor innkeepers did not get any when their businesses were destroyed by the railroads. Let them be compensated even at the Bishop's estimate, which he says he "prevailed upon Mr. Corfield" to adopt, viz., 2s. 6d. for the open ground and 6s. 6d. for the brick graves. Canterbury Registrars and fat pluralists will cut up one of these days sufficiently well to supply the needful: in the mean time let the convives of the earthworm feed without the walls.