Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 2.djvu/635

 €28 FEDEBAIi BBPOETEB. �remain Luried in its soil; and professedly and apparently for sanitary purposes. The statute knows nothing of the objecta or motives of the exhumation, except as provided in section 6, that the act shall not apply to removals from one place of interment to another in the same county. This exception is doubtless made for those common cases wherein no vault or burial place has been provided for the deceased during life, and the remains are temporarily deposited in a public receiv- ing vault, or the vault or grounds of some friend, till the sur- viving friends can provide for a place of final sepulture. These removals are ordinarily from one place of burial to another in the same or an adjacent cemetery, where there are several cemeteries lying near each other, as in San Francisco, and therefore not so fuUy within the reason upon which the act is founded. The statute deals with the local inter-terri- "torial fact of burial and exhumation, without regard, in other respects than that stated, to motive or intention, race or nation, citizenship or alienage, future domestic or foreign sepulture. �The matter of the burial and exhumation of the dead, with a view to sanitary objects, has in ail times and among ail civilized nations been regarded as a proper subject of local reg- ulation. It is founded upon the law of self-protection. The fact that in many or even most instances the object of disin- terment is to send the remains abroad, cannot affect the ques- tion. The local sanitary considerations must be the same, whatever the purpose of exhumation and transportation ihrough the streets of a city. The fact that the Chinese ex- hume and transport to their own country the remains of ail or nearly ail their dead, (amounting to more than ninety per cent, of ail such removals,) while other aliens and citizens comparatively but rarely perform these acts, only shows that this generality of practice requires more rigid regulations and more careful scrutiny, in order to guard against infections and other sanitary inoonvenienees, that would otherwise be required. In Secor's Case, Pratt, J., says : "A proper respect for the memory of the dead, a regard for the tender sensibil- lies of the living, and a due preservation of the public health, ����