View report page

INTRAMURAL BURIAL. 43
prohibition of intramural interments), there are
three points to which even now I think it advisable
to advert, as essential to the admissibility of such a
plan. I would submit, first, that the site of any
such cemetery must be sufficiently remote from
the metropolis to obviate any repetition of the
present injury to a resident population; and I hardly
know how this purpose can be attained, without
going some distance beyond the immediate suburbs
of London as indicated by the Bills of Mortality:
—secondly, that the space required for the proper
inhumation of the dead of the City of London
would be not less that 35 acres; and, thirdly, I
would suggest that the charter of such an establishment
ought to contain provisions against the
erection of houses within a certain distance of the
burial-ground, so that this may at all times and
under all circumstances be surrounded, exterior
to its wall, by a considerable belt of land totally
devoid of resident population. The absence of
such a provision as the last would very soon lead
to the extramural cemetery becoming intramuralized
by the growth of a new suburb around it, and
would again evince, by new and unnecessary
illustrations, how incompatible with each other
are the Dead and the Living as tenants of one
locality.