MORTUARY ELECTROPLATING
TO the proposition that electroplating the dead is the best way to dispose of them there is this considerable objection—it does not dispose of them. The plan is not without its advantages, some of which are obvious enough to mention. Nothing, for example, can be more satisfactory to a husband engaged in dying than the reflection that as a nickel-plated statue of himself he may still adorn the conjugal fireside and become an object of peculiar interest and sympathy to his successor. There are few remains, indeed, to whom this would not seem a softer billet than “to lie in cold obstruction” in a cemetery, from which, after all, one is usually routed out in a few years to accommodate a corner grocery or a boarding-house.
The light cost of ornamenting our public buildings with distinguished men themselves, as compared with the present enormous expense of obtaining statues of them, will commendthe régime of electroplating to every frugal taxpayer and make him hail its dawn with a peculiar joy. In order to make the most of this advantage it is to be hoped that any public-spirited “prominent citizen” feeling his sands of life about run out, would consent to be posed by an artist in some striking and heroic attitude, ready for therigor mortisto fix him in it for the plater. It would be but a trifling sacrifice for a great writer to pass the last ten minutes of his life cross-legged in a chair, with a pen in one hand and a thumb and forefinger of the other spanning a space on his dome of thought. A distinguished statesman would not find it so very inconvenient to breathe his last standing in the characteristic attitude of his profession, his left thumb supported in the opening of a waistcoat thoughtfully constructed to button the wrong way, and his right hand holding a scroll. In dying grandly on the acclivity of a rearing horse, a famous warrior could at the same time lay his countrymen under an added obligation and assist them fitly to discharge it.
The process of electroplation (if one may venture to anticipate a word that is inevitable) does not, unluckily, permit us to retainthe deceased “in his habit as he lived,” textile fabrics not being susceptible to the magic of its method; but the figures of eminent decedents exposed in public places to fire the ambition of American youth could be provided with real tailor-made suits, either in the fashion of their time and Congressional district or in that of ancient Rome, as might be preferred by the public taste for the time being, and the tailors’ bills would probably, in some instances, be almost as interesting, if not nearly so startling, as that item in an early English Passion-play account, in which the management is charged five shillings and sixpence for “a cote for Godd.”
To that entire class of decedents whom we may call eminent-public-services men, the objection that electroplating the dead does not permanently dispose of them has no practical application. Of them we do not wish to dispose; we want to retain them for embellishment of our parks, the façades of our public buildings and the walls of our art galleries. But in its relation to “vulgar deaths unknown to fame” the objection is indeed fatal. If this mortal is going to put on immortality in so strictly literal a sense—if the dead are to be still with us in a tangible and visiblereality, the fact will be embarrassing, no doubt. Under a régime in which a dead man will take up as much room as a living one, it is evident that the dead in general will take up a deal more than the living, and the disproportion will increase at an alarming rate.
Science assures us that but for death—including decay—the world would now be so overcrowded that there would be “standing room only,” even for scientists. Electroplating proposes to enjoin decay. Is it advisable? Is it wise? Is it fair to posterity? Shall we impose ourselves upon those who “inherit us,” without providing for the expense of our warehousing? It can hardly be expected that even the most “well-preserved old gentleman” will be an object of veneration and affection to his great-great-great-grandchild, even if he is so fortunate as to be authentic—unless, indeed, he happen to be plated with gold. In that case, though, he would be hardly likely to descend intact to so remote a generation. An unusually comely electroplatee of the opposing sex might be a joy forever as a work of art, and the task of polishing her be a labor of love for many centuries; but the common ruck of hard-shell ancestors, although bearing inscriptions attestingtheir possession of the loftiest virtues in their day and generation, would inspire an insufficiently tender emotion to pay for their lodging.
The time when our beautiful, but not altogether wholesome, cemeteries shall be no more, and in the place of them countless myriads of battered and rusted images shall be corded up like firewood all over the smiling land is a time which we may be thankful that we shall not live to see, and which our love of display should not make us selfishly assist in expediting. It is a glittering temptation, but in fair play to posterity (which has never done anything to embarrass us) it ought to be put resolutely aside.