Indeed, even if it were practicable, I should be sorry to see our people handed over for burial to a joint stock company. I am very far from saying this out of any sympathy with the popular, and often indiscriminate and unreasonable jealousy felt towards all joint stock companies. Nay, I see obvious reasons why the cemeteries of such companies should be a great improvement upon the present system of private speculation in burial grounds. And it may be thought that, as a clergyman and an interested party, I may naturally prefer these cemeteries, because their proprietors, unlike the private speculators, are required to indemnify the clergy for loss of fees by some amount of pecuniary compensation. But I do sympathize with the common repugnance to consign to joint stock companies the solemnities of Christian burial; and I believe that this repugnance is not more common than it is strong. “And so,” said a highly intelligent gentleman, pointing to a cemetery of this class, “the time is come when Christian burial is made an article of traffic.” And since the legislature has been reported to be contemplating the removal of burials from populous places, it has been commonly suspected of having been led to entertain the measure through the influence of joint stock cemetery proprietors. In fact the repugnance in question is no more than what I have already adverted to. It is the state of feeling which shrinks from associating the touching and impressive solemnities of burial with the profits of trade. So far as the trading principle is involved, the joint stock company is no better than the private speculator. However disinterested may have been the motives which have induced some to become shareholders in these companies, and I have been assured upon authority which I respect, that many have done so without any expectation or hope of profit upon their shares, yet the primary and effective character of these associations is undeniably that of trading associations, and they cannot be rescued from that character by even numerous individual exceptions. Their managers, like the proprietors of the private grounds, are assiduous in soliciting attention to their lists of prices; and affiches, painted in large letters, and placed at various outlets of the metropolis, with genuine mercantile officiousness, direct the public, as in a case close by my own parish, “To the E. L. Cemetery, only one mile and a-half.” Surely we may say, that this system also involves much that is inconsistent with reverential impressions of the sanctity of burial, much that must either offend or deteriorate the better feeling of our population. Then again, as regards burial services, and other details in the working of the system, with what security can we consign these to the tender mercies of a trading company? Why should not the money-getting principle eventually come to operate