Why, if the city _must_ bury its dead in trenches and under the conditions only half described above (because much of it is too sickening to present), why, if cremation or some better mode of burial is not possible--and certainly I think it is--why, at least, need the awful, the ghastly, the inhuman combination be made of burying together medium term criminals, imbeciles, lunatics, and thousands of corpses all on one mere scrap of land? If a seven-foot mass of corruption exhaling through the air and percolating through land and water must be devoted to the dead poor of a great city, why in the name of all that is civilized or humane, permit any living thing to be detained and poisoned on the same bit of earth?
I saw a woman who had come to visit her mother who was one of these poor, insane creatures. "I can't afford to keep her at home," she said, "and then at times she gets 'snags' and acts so that people are afraid of her, so I had to let her come here. It is kind of awful, ain't it?"
I thought it was "kind of awful," for more reasons than the poor woman could realize, for she was so used to foul air and knew so little of sanitary conditions that she was mercifully spared certain thoughts that seem to have escaped the authorities also.
"It is her birthday and I brought her this," she said, showing me a colored cookie. "She will like it. We can visit here one day each month if we have friends."
"How many bodies do you carry each week?" I asked of the captain of the city boat.
"About fifty," he said. But later on both he and the official on the Island told me that there were six thousand buried here yearly, so it will be seen that his estimate per week was less than half what it should have been.
I looked at the stack of pine boxes, the ends of which showed from beneath a tarpaulin on the deck.
They were stacked five deep. There were seven wee ones, hardly larger than would be filled by a good-sized kitten.
I said: "They are so _very_ small. I don't see how a baby was put inside."
The man to whom I spoke--a deck hand who was a "ten-day-self-committed," so the captain told me later--smiled a grim, sly smile and said:
"I reckon you're allowin' fer trimmin's. This kind don't get piliers and satin linin's. It don't take much room for a baby with no trimmin's an' mighty little clothes."