THE OWNERSHIP OF THE DEAD. 333 



having no legal right to crowd the living, each buried generation 

 must give way to its successor ; and that, therefore, an iron coffin, 

 which would unduly and unlawfully prolong the period for identify- 

 ing the remains, was ecclesiastically inadmissible, unless an extra fee 

 wei'e paid to the Church, 



The court will perceive, by the proofs in the case now under ex- 

 amination, that the remains of the exhumed body are identified beyond 

 doubt or question. The skeleton of the " posthumous man " is now 

 legally " standing in coui-t," distinctly individualized ; with his daugh- 

 ter, next and nearest of kin, at his side, to ask that the tribunal whose 

 order for widening the street ejected him from the grave will also 

 direct his decent interment. 



It was the pride of Diogenes, and his disciples of the ancient 

 school of cynics, to regard burial with contempt, and to hold it utterly 

 unimportant whether their bodies should be burned by fire or de- 

 voured by beasts, birds, or worms ; and a French philosopher of mod- 

 ern days, in a somewhat kindred spirit, descants upon tlie " glorious 

 nothingness" of the grave, and that " nameless thing" a dead body. 

 The secular jurispriidence of France holds it in higher and better re- 

 gard. In the interesting case reported in " Merlin's Repertoire," title 

 " Sepulture," where a large tract of land near Marseilles had necessarily 

 been taken for the burial of several thousand bodies, after the great 

 plague of 1720, it was adjudicated, by the secular court, that the land 

 should not be profaned by culture even of its surface, until the buried 

 dead had mouldered into dust. The eloquent ^9?t?02/er of the avocat- 

 general upon that occasion dwells with emphasis on the veneration 

 which all nations, in all ages, have shown for the grave adding, 

 however, with some little tinge of national irreverence, " C'est une 

 veneration tovjours revocable ! et toujours subordonnee au bien 

 public." 



In portions of Europe, during the semi-barbarous state of society in 

 the middle ages, the law permitted a creditor to seize the dead body 

 of his debtor ; and, in ancient Egypt, a son could borrow money by 

 hypothecating his father's corpse ; but no evidence appears to exist 

 in modern jurisprudence of a legal right to convert a dead body to 

 any purpose of pecuniary profit. 



It will be seen that much of the apparent difficulty of this subject 

 arises from a false and needless assumption in holding that nothing 

 is property that has not a pecuniary value. The real question is not 

 of the disposable, marketable value of a corpse, or its remains, as an 

 article of traffic, but it is of the sacred and inherent right to its cus- 

 tody, in order decently to bury it and secure its undistiirbed repose. 

 The insolent dogma of the English ecclesiastical law, that a child has 

 no such claim, no such exclusive power, no peculiar interest in the dead 

 body of its parent, is so utterly inconsistent with every enlightened 

 perception of personal right, so inexpressibly repulsive to every proper 



