Ir is indicative of a want of thought in the present reform movement in Japan, that one of the last edicts of the Government should be directed against the burning of the dead. Setting aside the religious view of the matter, there is no doubt that the opinion is gaining ground in Europe that a return to the system of cremation would be a step in-the right direction. Mankind "seem in fact to have been swayed by many changes in the tide of public opinion, in the matter of the disposal of their dead, and there are few countries which have not passed through one or more phases of practice. From time immemorial the Jewish races, to whom we owe directly our present custom of inferment, have buried their dead. The nations from whom we have mainly derived our secular civilization were equally persistent in the practice of cremation, From India in the Hast to Great Britain in the West, with one remarkable exception, the custom of cremation was prevalent at the height of ancient civilization, and only fell from the influence of Christianity whose doctrines were supposed, rightly or wrongly, to demand the burial intact burial, and exposed the bodies of the dead in towers open to the breath of heaven, where birds of prey performed for the departed the rites of sepulture. The influence of Judaism alone would probably not have been sufficient to have altered the practice of cremation, which in itself need have caused no repugnance to the most devoted Christian; and it was not improbably one of the points of the strange Eastern influence which crept over the Christian Church in the first. two centuries of its existence, that finally led to the abandon-of cremation in favour of the less striking and, for the survivors, more unhealthy practice of interment. No one who has had occasion to wander though the cemeteries of Europe, unless he is warped by prejudice, can pretend that in the alteration of the practice civilization has gained. Few things are more revolting, at first sight even, than the aspect of a city churchyard; but first sight is nothing to what becomes known by practice to those who have had to deal with these receptacles of the departed. Few countries possess more graceful cemeteries than Japan. They appear in vivid contrast to our own, whose forbidding aspect is often only an indication of still worse neglect within. If at the present moment the choice of the two methods of sepulture, leaving old practice and prejudice to one side, were to be offered to us, there is little doubt that cremation would win the day. We regret this last step of the Japanese, as a step in the wrong direction, taken merely in pursuance of the desire of imitation which too plainly marks the progress of the nation. In some matters the Japanese have shown themselves capable of original thought; it seems a pity that they should, in their recent attempts at improvement, have seen fit to throw all originality overboard.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.