regulation which appears
to have been greatly honoured in the breach. In 1776 Louis XVI.,
recognizing the benefit which Paris had derived from the city decree,
prohibited graveyards in all the cities and towns of France, and
rendered unlawful interments in churches and chapels; and in 1790
the National Assembly passed an Act commanding that all the old
burial-grounds, even in the villages, should be closed, and others
provided at a distance from habitations.[8] Other States of Europe
took pattern by these enlightened proceedings, and America was not
slow in making laws upon the subject; but Great Britain, and its worst
offender, London, went on in the old way, without let or hindrance,
until 1850, For fifteen years prior to that date there had been in
progress an agitation against the existing order of things, led by Dr.
G.A. Walker, a Drury Lane surgeon, living in a very nest of churchyard
fevers, who wrote a book and several pamphlets, delivered public
lectures, and raised a discussion in the public press. The London City
Corporation petitioned Parliament in 1842 for the abolition of burials
within the City, and a Select Committee of the House of Commons was at
once entrusted with an enquiry on the subject.

[Footnote 8: In France in 1782-3, in order to check the pestilence,
the remains of more than six millions of people were disinterred from
the urban churchyards and reburied far away from the dwelling-places.
The Cemetery of Pere la Chaise was a later creation, having been
consecrated in 1804.]

The following were the official figures shewing the burials in the
London district[9] from 1741 to 1837, and it was asserted that many
surreptitious interments were unrecorded:

From 1741 to 1765 588,523

" 1766 to 1792 605,832

" 1793 to 1813 402,595

" 1814 to 1837 508,162

Total 2,105,112

In the same year (1842) a Export was presented to Parliament by the
Select Committee on "The Improvement of the Health of Towns," and
especially on "The Effect of the Interment of Bodies in Towns." Its
purport may be summed up in the following quotation:

"The evidence ... gives a loathsome picture of the unseemly and
demoralizing practices which result from the crowded condition of the
existing graveyards--practices which could scarcely have been thought
possible in the present state of society.... We cannot arrive at any
other conclusion than that the nuisance of interments in great towns
and the inj