Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/636

 all time would be worse than nothing. A Grave The Problem. not memory bring you the better part of587 the

world must be conceived as full of ghosts of the evil ways of men stalking up and down among men, all bent upon the creation of an immortality of evil. The world would be growing worse instead of better. There would be no evolution from lower to higher species, from good to better, but the trend would be backwards towards the worst of the type and still on backwards. The people would be losing their souls, for the evil that men do which lives after them would be stealing them. How is it, Willie, are you right about this or wrong? From the most ancient of days comes the admonishment to speak good of the dead. To keep in remembrance the good, to bury the evil, has been the preachment. This has become a truth that flows through the blood of the race. The great majority of us will berate a fellow being as long as we have him with us. Once he is out of reach we open our mouths to continue the berating, but because we do not like to hear the sound of our own voices speaking ill of the dead, we shut them and try to think of his good points, and, strange, we now find them. When we come upon some one who reck lessly speaks ill of the dead, how we hold up our hands in holy horror. This characteris tic of the race means that we are burying or trying to bury the evil all the time and are keeping or trying to keep the good. Which is it that lives after us, anyhow? Good and evil are in many respects ab stract terms. Good is the understood, the evil often is the misunderstood, and the evil becomes the good when it comes to be under stood. These terms may mean the sum total of the aspirations of the soul or its des perations, or vice versa, often depending upon the point of view. They may mean when applied to dead men, departed strength or weakness. Take a look backward; does

dead? We are all genuinely shocked, are we not, or do we only pretend to be, when those of us who are buzzards pick over the bones of the dead. We make no claim that the most of us are birds of paradise, — simply that we are not buzzards with their memo ries. The subject presents a more restricted question, namely, what do we bury when we inter the bones of the dead, — good or evil? That depends, if with the bones goes cor rupting flesh afflicted with small-pox, yellow fever or the many other ills flesh is heir to. Those who survive must often feel that evil has been interred with the bones, evil that would seek to live afterwards. If, however, one sinks to sleep whose life has been a blessing to all about her, it is difficult to think anything else than that the capacity for much good to others has been interred, and we comfort the thought that we still have the influence of that life with us and hope that that capacity has gone where it can have greater appreciations. When we come to throw legal precedents at the immortal William, to quote authorities and cite the decisions of the courts, we are compelled to reach an even yet more re stricted point of view of the subject. It must be further admitted that the respondent could get much comfort out of them. Could he talk back he would undoubtedly hope lessly confound us or hoist us on our own petards, for as long as courts reverse them selves they sometimes throw boomerangs. The point is this, — given a body buried, is it evil or good in a physical sense that is in terred with the bones; does that which lives after men work physical good or evil in the grave to the rest of humanity so as to require the intervention of a Court of Equity to abate the residuum? It has been legally determined that there