[96] For similar reasons, I defer any discussion of the depth at which bodies may most properly be deposited in the ground. The thickness of superjacent soil, which will deodorise, before their escape, the gaseous products of any given decomposing mass, or which will retain these gases more or less permanently in combination, varies most importantly with certain chemical and mechanical qualities of the soil: and on these it would be useless to dwell by anticipation. For accurate results, it may be necessary, after the selection of a site and during its preparation, to institute experiments on the subject.
There is yet one other consideration which may affect the extent of your purchase. The law restricts you from approaching within 200 yards of any dwelling-house, without the previous written consent of its owner, lessee, and occupier. But there is no law restricting the nearness within which any builder may approach your wall with his design for new habitations; and it might easily occur to you, within a short time of establishing your Cemetery, to find a new town growing in close proximity around it. If there be any meaning and value in the clause, which forbids your undue approach to inhabited houses—if it truly represent that this approach would be a sanitary evil, then obviously the law is deficient in the respect adverted to. It would be in your power to guarantee the continuance of a belt of unoccupied ground, as an immediate circuit to your Cemetery, in either of two ways:—either, namely, you might purchase a considerable extent of ground beyond the actual requirements of your Cemetery, might devote its central hundred acres to interment, and might let its remaining circumference for agricultural purposes; or, if you were fortunate enough to be treating for the central portion of some considerable estate, you might stipulate, as a condition of purchase, that no building should be reared within such distance of the wall of your Cemetery, as you, on due consideration, may deem fit.
II. In the provision of a Cemetery, it is required by the Act of Parliament, that ‘the Burial-Board shall have reference to the convenience of access thereto from the Parish or Parishes for which the same is provided;’ and it is legalised, that ‘any Burial-Board may make such arrangements as they may from time to time think fit, for facilitating the conveyance of the Bodies of the Dead from the Parish, or the place of Death, to the Burial-ground which shall be provided.’
It cannot but be obvious to you, that the choice of a site for your Cemetery might be such as to interpose very serious obstacles in the way of interment, even for the richest classes; and under the most favorable circumstances, the removal of the dead to a distance of some miles from their previous residence, cannot but threaten serious difficulty to the poor. Assuming—what various conditions of the Act of Parliament render almost inevitable, that your Cemetery must be distant at least six miles from the centre of the City, the present funeral charges can hardly be maintained without increase, if the traffic is to be conducted on the same principles as heretofore. The price for which an artisan could procure a decent funeral for his wife or child, within a stone’s throw of his door, will unavoidably be augmented by every mile you add to the distance, if the conveyance is still to depend on the old means and arrangements.
When I consider the classes of persons likely, as inhabitants of the City, to claim interment in your Cemetery—classes, among which the predominance of narrow, if not necessitous, circumstances will be frequent; when, for instance, in a year’s official returns, I see that artisans and paupers make more than two-thirds of your entire classified mortality; I cannot but think this aspect of the matter a very important one. From some years’ experience of your death-register, I should say that, of City funerals, there would not be one in ten where the friends could afford to disregard an additional expenditure of half a guinea; and, in the majority of instances, I am persuaded that a smaller addition would be enough to cause inconvenience and distress. It therefore seems to me certain, that your plan for extramural sepulture, however perfect at all other points, might either entirely fail of its purpose, or become cruelly oppressive to the poor, by the simple expensiveness of approaching the burial-place. And I suppose it was in anticipation of the difficulties here adverted to, that the framers of the Metropolitan Burials Act introduced the permissive clause, which I just quoted, empowering Burial-Boards ‘to facilitate the conveyance’ of the dead, and thus virtually rendering them responsible, so far as the poorer classes are concerned, for the cheapness and efficiency of such conveyance.
I would therefore submit, that in your decision as to the site of your Cemetery, so soon as the indispensable conditions of appropriate soil are given, the first point to examine is accessibility; that the spot to be chosen should have, in addition to its carriage roads, the utmost facility of railway approach; and that, for those with whom small differences of price are an important consideration, you should be able to guarantee a rate of transport for coffin and mourners, not in excess of existing charges.
From observation of arrangements which have lately been made with Railway-Companies by the Directors of Cemeteries, and from inquiry of persons engaged in such undertakings, I entertain little doubt that you might make a contract to the following effect with the authorities of any line convenient for your purpose—viz., that every day, at a fixed hour, there should be a train, or some portion of a train, exclusively adapted to the funeral purposes of the poorer classes; that for this train there should be issued funeral tickets, franking the conveyance of a coffin with some stated number of mourners, who should also be entitled to return; that the introduction of funeral traffic should be by a special entrance, and its exit at a special terminus.
Such contract supposed,—in connexion with this funeral train, you might further arrange to maintain public hearses; which, at the option of persons concerned, and on due requisition being made, should convey any coffin from its former home to the railway terminus; and which again, if necessary, at the distal station, should complete its conveyance to the grave. This facility might even be extended, if the distances were considerable, to the similar conveyance of a certain number of mourners, with the undertaker in charge of their procession.
Also, if desirable, it could no doubt be arranged, with a view to economy, that the undertaker’s responsibility for a funeral should terminate at the railway terminus, up to which he would have conducted it; and that its reception at the distal station should be entrusted to servants of your Cemetery, who would then fulfil all remaining duties in respect of it.