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their prime enthusiasm. Fifteen or 30 years later, it would take a motor tractor and thorough ploughing
more than once over to restore the evenness of the meadow and, without this aid, a hundred years
more will still see its furrows, bumps and weeds.
The mounds of rubble and cairns of granite in out-of-the-way Normanton and Ditsworthy have
grown into their setting of beauty and interest; but allotments gone out of cultivation are to be
seen studded over this England now ours, but which will revert to generations born and unborn as
our legacy.
In our modern cemeteries and churchyards the surface is not only unlevel, it is packed with
shaped stones, few of intrinsic beauty, most of stereotyped design and devoid of artistic merit. The
result as to the distance, middle distance or close perspective, is that of an ugly scar on the landscape ;
the description, "perfectly dreadful," is mild. I would ask you to look critically at them and question
yourselves whether this is in reality our honour to the dead and whether it bears any relation to worthy
remembrance of them among the living.
So far, the surface; now, and as shortly as possible, a deeper insight into this bounden duty
of honouring. St. Paul has familiarised us with a seven-word picture of a process of disintegration
of the body which has no relation to that obtaining in England. " Perfectly dreadful" is an apt
description of this, but the actuality at present in England is as much more so, as it is more protracted.
I am not going to describe it. It neither bears inspection nor does it leave room for argument; it is
no honour to the dead and now is less to the living.
How up to the present could such things have been, and with quiet acquiescence? Just this—
there was no alternative to the one ugly fashion. This is the full and correct answer. Kites there
were not, the pyre insufficient, the worm unthinkable : thus the unseen and unminded evil. Why
in the present does it exist? Fashion swings on, the out of sight is out of mind as regards the unpleasant
physics and chemistry of the subject, and the alternative is not yet in full working order ;
the crematoria are insufficient in number and their location not generally at hand.
The subject as regards large towns must be pressed at once, because there is an alternative,
it can now be stated, in terms, that cemeteries are ugly, unworthy centres of massive and protracted
putrefaction brought on the one hand up to the doors of dwelling houses, or on the other engulfed
by them.
In early bronze times there are to be found, at Normanton, more cremations than earth burials;
in Dorset county the proportion is greater still; in Cornwall the pyre was almost universal. In Cornwall's
comparative hives of industry the knowledge which permitted the process of smelting copper
from the dross may have influenced this purity of method. We, in more crowded times and expanded
knowledge, cannot afford to neglect the application of the perfected cleanness in disposal knowledge
has brought us.