’In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, three hundred years previously, the victims of the pestilence had been buried.  Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease.’—­North American review, no. 3, Vol. 135.

In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:—­

’One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in the United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes.  Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business.  Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880!  These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.’

For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap {footnote [Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]}—­so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by-and-bye.  The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for two thousand years.

I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy manual labor.  He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless.  To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster.  While I was writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child.  He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was within his means.  He bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain wood, stained.  It cost him twenty-six dollars.  It would have cost less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into.  He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months.

Chapter 43 The Art of Inhumation

About the same time, I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed.  I said—­