§ 260. That the agency of properly qualified officers of health necessary for abating the evils of the practice of interments would also serve powerfully to promote the application of those sanitary measures which in some districts would, there is reason to believe, save more than their own pecuniary expense, merely in the diminished numbers combined with reduced expenses of funerals, consequent on the practical operation of comprehensive measures of sanitary improvement. (§ 201.)
§ 261. The advantages which the measures proposed offer to the classes who now stand most in need of a beneficent intervention, may be thus recapitulated. To take the poorest class: the labouring man would (in common with the middle and higher classes) gain, on the occasion of his demise, protection for his widow and surviving children, that is to say;
Protection from the physical evil occasioned by the necessity of the prolonged retention of his remains in the living and sleeping room:
Protection against extortionate charges for interment, and against the impositions of unnecessary, expensive, and unseemly funereal customs, maintained against the wishes of private individuals and families:
Protection and redress to his survivors or the living against any unfair or illegal practices, should any such have led to the death:
Protection against any discoverable causes of ill health, should any have attached to his abode or to his place of work:
Protection from the painful idea (by arrangements preventive of the possibility) of a premature interment:
Protection of the remains from profanation, either before or after interment:
Protection such as may be afforded by the information and advice of a responsible officer, of knowledge, and station, in the various unforeseen contingencies that occur to perplex and mislead the prostrate and desolate survivors on such occasions. (§ 191 to § 207.)
Added to these will be the relief from the prospect of interment, in a common grave-yard or charnel, by the substitution of a public national cemetery, on which the mind may dwell with complacency, as a place in which sepulture may be made an honour and a privilege.