Within a quite recent period at least two graveyards in Montreal have been torn up to make public squares; and it is not likely that any more respect will be shown to cemeteries in the future than there has been in the past.
Dr. Wm. Porter says: “I well remember, when a boy, seeing our old sexton exhume a body buried for several years,—that of a strong man called away in the prime of life. The rotting coffin was slowly lifted from its damp bed, and the lid being broken, we saw within a horrible mass of putrefaction. Matted hair and decomposing grave-clothes but poorly covered the blackened skeleton as it lay in the once handsome casket, now reeking with the emanation of its loathsome contents. Yet this had been a beautiful grave; roses had blossomed upon it, and the arbor vitæ had whispered to it. There would be but little plea for the grave on the ground of sentiment could we see the changes there taking place; there would be few, if any, who would not choose that the body, after faithful service, should be purified by fire, rather than rot in such a grave.”
We are accustomed to consider sacred the venerable remains of our dead, and the simplest memorial of a departed friend makes us, if but for moments, sad. Therefore, all who lay any claim to civilization or humanity must be vehemently opposed to the profane exhibition of the bones of the deceased in bone-houses, where they lie pell-mell in a heap, or catacombs, where they stand braced against the wall, lie in their coffins, or are put away in niches, i.e., on the shelf, and where any dawdling fool may inspect them for a small sum of money.
The Rev. H. R. Haweis states: “Where are the thousands who were laid in the heart of Paris, and who slept for centuries in the graveyards of the Innocents, St. Eustache, St. Etienne de Prés? Every tourist who takes a return ticket to Paris may gaze upon their bones, speculate upon their skulls, and finger their dust. By order of the minister of police they were all dug up in 1787 and carted off to the catacombs. The bones were cleaned and arranged in grim and picturesque symmetry. In one gallery are the arms, legs, and thighs intersected by rows of skulls; the small bones are thrown in heaps behind them. Whose dust is separate there? whose ashes are sacred? And yet they were borne to this grotesque sepulchre with priests and tapers.”
As regards disrespect and insult to the dead, a correspondent of the Medical Times and Gazette, writing from Bordeaux, says:—
“The earth around one of the oldest churches in Bordeaux seems to have something peculiarly antiseptic in its nature, so that the bodies buried during ages were converted into mummies. During some alterations at the beginning of this century these bodies were laid bare, and instead of being decently buried again, they were taken out of their resting-place and ranged upright in a row around a crypt under the bell-tower of St. Michael. Here they constitute a disgusting and demoralizing show, which is visited by crowds of people, and I am afraid that the clergy of the church are not ashamed to pocket the profits. A rough fellow, a candle on the end of a stick, such as they have in wine-cellars, goes round as showman. He taps and thumps the bodies to show that they are perfectly sound, tough like leather trunks, and not the least brittle. ‘See here, gentlemen, is a very tall man; see how powerful his muscles must have been, and what excellent calves he has now! The next is the body of a young woman. Remark the excellent preservation of her chemise, though it was buried 400 years ago; and see, it is trimmed with lace. The next, gentlemen, is a priest; you can see his soutane with the buttons on it. There is a woman with a dreadful chasm in her breast; she had a cancer. The next four are a family poisoned with mushrooms; observe the contortions of their faces from the coliques they suffered. See, next, a very old man with his wig still awry upon his pate. The next is a poor misérable that was buried alive. See how his head is turned to one side and the body half turned round, in the frantic effort to get out of the coffin, with his mouth open and gasping.’ (It is quite true that the attitude is singular, but it does not warrant the inference which the showman draws.) But enough of this disgusting mercenary exhibition of the human body in its lowest state of humiliation. If the guardians of consecrated sepulchres, in which people have paid an honest fee to be buried, are to dig them up and cart them off as in England, or make a show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead.”
There are many such shows where the human corpse is used for the purpose of eliciting money from a public loving horrible and sensational sights. I need but mention the catacombs of Rome, or the Bleikeller of Bremen, to conjure up before your mind all the terrible scenes which the clerical and medical gentlemen whom I have just cited have pictured.
There is another way in which the dead are insulted, another mode by which their graves are desecrated. The monuments which are erected upon the last resting-place of the deceased to perpetuate their memory are sometimes moved about till they no longer mark the spot where the person whose name they bear was interred. Here, then, all the good intentions of friends are set at naught; their expense, their attention, is all in vain. The tombstones are moved, and when they become yellow with age they are broken up to act as headstones for some public highway. That this does not hold good of European countries only, but also of American ones, is proven by our honored and beloved “autocrat of the breakfast table,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, who declares: “The most accursed act of vandalism ever committed within my knowledge was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city burial-grounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. The stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those records meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame! That is all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was enacted. I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed or removed and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones. Epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of ‘Here lies’ never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.”
Now be candid! Do you not think that facts like these go a good way to endorse cremation? There would be no need of disturbing the dead, there would be no vulgar exhibition of the deceased, after incineration would have been introduced. There would, in fact, be nothing to do violence to that most sacred and deep-rooted feeling of humanity,—respect for the dead.
Among all the outrages on the dead, that committed by the hand of ghoulish desecration is, by far, the worst. Body-snatching, for providing anatomical institutions with material, has become a business in the United States; love of gain being, as usual, the cause. And not only are bodies abducted to supply medical colleges, but persons are liable to be murdered for the same reason. In February of 1884 two negroes were arrested at Cincinnati, who, after a severe examination, confessed to having killed an old man, his wife, and his adopted daughter; after which they sold the corpses to the Ohio Medical College, receiving $15 for each.