Page:A contribution to the settlement of the burials question.djvu/13

9 at all unless he was baptized in Church; the Nonconformist of 1835 could not be married at all unless he was married in Church. Is there anything to prevent the modern Nonconformist from providing himself with a place of burial as his ancestors provided themselves with chapels as soon as ever the law permitted them to do so? There is nothing whatever to prevent him; and the present grievance bears no analogy whatever to those previous grievances, which were very real ones.

But this leads us to see what is the real grievance of non-Churchmen, i.e., of all British subjects who are not members of the Church of England. It is that, whereas the State provides a place of burial for Churchmen, it makes no satisfactory provision for the burial of non-Churchmen, and therefore the question at once arises whether it is not the duty of the State to provide for all her citizens, whether Churchmen or non-Churchmen, Christians or non-Christians, on a footing of perfect equality, national burying-places in the various parishes of the land, just as the State provided a National Registry of Births, and Deaths, and Marriages.

Looking, then, at the question in this light, it seems that it would be very desirable to follow up the Cemeteries Act, and apply gradually to the whole country the same provisions which are now applied to two-thirds of the population. If an Act were passed prohibiting any further enlargement of churchyards, and substituting for such enlargement the acquisition, as the necessity might arise, of cemeteries, to be bought and kept up by rates and a fixed portion of the burial fees, the burials grievance would disappear entirely in about ten or fifteen years. Every year would sweep away from one to two hundred parishes in which the grievance exists, and, in the meantime, silent