THE WORKER.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 23, 4 June 1892, Page 565

THE WORKER.

From Queensland comes a small but pungent sheet— The Worker. Written with snap and the healthy courage of conviction. The Worker asks your opinion on itself, calmly letting you see it doesn't care a dump whether your criticism be favourable or otherwise. But here you have the keynote of the paper. It is absolutely fearless so far as we can judge, and like the miller on the Dee, it cares for nobody, yet trusts by its very outspokenness to make somebody care for it. There is less of the cant of rights and the ‘ pore workin’ man ’ than we recollect in any paper of its sort. A self-re-specting paper it is, and with a spice of healthy colonial blow about it. The cartoons are smart, and it does not contain an ounce of padding. As a sample of co operative journalism it warms the heart, but how is it managed ’ The following par is worth quoting, and shows the style of The Worker -.—

‘ The sheer stupid conservatism of the average man is only paralleled by the way in which a thousand sheep will jump over nothing if one of them happens to take a skip there. Everyone knows that burial is an offensive and repulsive method of disposing of the dead, the source of much disease and the subject of universal condemnation, yet burial keeps merrily on. Not even the ever-increasing knowledge, now we begin to know a little of the nature of previously obscure diseases, that a very considerable number of people, whom any one of us may join, are buried alive owing to their being mistaken for dead, seems to shake the stolid conservatism encrusted round this custom. At Lyons, France, one man will probably oppose burial from this time forth and forever ; but then he was recently lifted out of the coffin about to be nailed down over him, and when one has had such a narrow squeak for life and has run such close risk of the most horrible of second deaths, one can hardly feel stolid any more. This terrible fate is practically in front of everybody so long as burial continues under its present form, and nowhere more so than in Queensland, where interment follows so rapidly upon the pronouncement of death. It is necessary either to postpone the burial ceremonies until absolute decomposition commences, a difficult thing, or to follow some other mode of returning the life left body to the dust it sprang from and goes back to. Of the alternatives the latter is the most convenient, and of available methods cremation is the simplest, cleanest and most attractive. Strange words to use on such a subject, but true nevertheless.

‘ As a matter of fact, cremation is by far the most natural of such chlorinisation processes. It has been used all over the world and in various stages of social development, particularly among peoples who believed in the survival of the spirit of man, and could see no further use for the body except to be got out of the way as innocently as possible. It is only peoples who expect to be raised again in the same flesh and bones and blood, and who in some mysterious way therefore prefer slow putrid corruption to a swift heatcleansed disintegration who have ever attached any special importance to burial. Some of the leading scientists contend that the funeral rites of bygone races do actually convey to us, in the symbolising of burning or burial, whether spiritualism or materialism was the basis of their future worlds. And it isn’t very edifying to find that our own objectionable burial custom springs from an almost forgotten and certainly exploded idea that our actual nails and teeth and meat would ap pear at the Judgment Day, and thencefrom enjoy or suffer through the endless ages of eternity. Even tiie most conservative churches have modified this into a more spiritual teaching, but still we put our corpses underground and suffer in every wayfrom this defiance of intelligent reason and observation. Why should we not carry our dead to a public crematorium, where they could remain under hygienic conditions, constantly and scientifically watched until decomposition—the only reliable proof of death—actually set in ; then to be cremated either publicly or privately as their friends desired, and their ashes deposited, in the old-time funereal urns, as most desired ’ This would be the inevitable reduction of man to dust carried on in a manner most effective and least repellant and perfectly securely. Surely it is better than the barbarous and dangerous mode now in vogue, only we’re too conservative to start on it.’