Now here the Metropolitan Interments Bill steps in, and aims at
destroying our only chances of keeping up business as heretofore. We
have generally to deal with parties whose feelings are not in a state
to admit of their making bargains with us--a circumstance, on their
parts, which is highly creditable to human nature; and favorable
to trade. Thus, in short, gentlemen, we have it all our own way
with them. But this Bill comes between the bereaved party and the
undertaker. By the twenty-seventh clause, it empowers the Board of
Health to provide houses and make arrangements for the reception and
care of the dead previously to, and until interment; in order, as
it explains in a subsequent clause, to the accommodation of persons
having to provide the funerals--supposing such persons to desire the
accommodation. Clause the twenty-eighth enacts "That the said Board
shall make provision for the management and conduct, by persons
appointed by them, of the funerals of persons whose bodies are to be
interred in the Burial Grounds, to be provided under this Act, where
the representatives of the deceased, or the persons having the care
and direction of the funeral, desire to have the same so conducted;
and the said Board shall fix and publish a scale of the sums to be
payable for such funerals, inclusive of all matters and services
necessary for the same, such sums to be proportioned to the
description of the funeral, or the nature of the matter and services
to be furnished and rendered for the same; but so that in respect of
the lowest of such sums, the funerals may be conducted with decency
and solemnity." Gentlemen, if this enactment becomes law, we shall
lose all the advantages which we derived from bereaved parties' state
of mind. The Board of Health will take all trouble off their hands, at
whatever sum they may choose to name. Of course they will apply to the
Board of Health instead of coming to us. But what is beyond everything