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the case of a person who dies and whose body must necessarily pollute
a certain portion of ground if he is buried, why should not cremation
be carried out by the municipal authority as a sanitary and public
health measure ?
You have only to educate the public to it and get the Home
Secretary to introduce a Bill to give permissive powers to all local
authorities to perform cremation upon anyone who wants it.
Naturally the wealthier people would not avail themselves of it,
but it would be a great boon to the poorer classes. Many poor people
find it a great tax upon their resources to bury their dead. It induces
them to spend a great proportion of their hard earned money on funeral
ceremonies, which they cannot afford.
Sanitary authorities should not, to begin with, provide crematoria
of their own, but should link up with the local cremation authorities for
the cremation of the dead. Personally, I do not favour granting this
boon free of charge as some suggest; it is of course a matter of opinion.
I think that where working men are paying into a burial society, those
payments should be transferred to the Cremation Society until such
time as the local sanitary authorities link up with the Cremation Society.
Until this is done, men and women whose minds are made up should
pay their cremation fee in advance. You can do this by paying £5
once or £1 a year for five years to the Secretary of the Cremation
Society; there would then be no cremation fee to be paid at death.
Let me close with an appeal to you to throw aside your apathy and
indifference and your fatal indecision towards this question.
The Cremation Society has no vested interests, therefore it has
little or no money to throw away in advertising.
In every public library and town hall, the literature of the Society
should be made available to the public at a cost to the rates of some
six shillings.
Think, lastly, of the present day cemetery; it is not beautiful, it is
a depressing and mournful place. Seas of gravestones, acres of tombs,
some upstanding, others being erected, but many tumbling over,
passing where everything must eventually go—to destruction and
decay.
The idea of placing a body in a small piece of land, there to rest in
peace until the last trump, is not true, for we know graves are disturbed,
and the cemetery itself must become derelict in a few years.