ho would make a pun
would pick a pocket. Well; we all try to do the best we can for
ourselves--everybody else as well as undertakers. Burials may be
expensive, but so is legal redress. So is spiritual provision; I mean
the maintenance of all our reverends and right reverends. I am quite
sure that both lawyers' charges and the revenues of some of the chief
clergy are very little, if any, more reasonable than our own prices.
Pluralities are as bad as crowded gravepits, and I don't see that
there is a pin to choose between the church and the churchyard.
Sanitary revolutionists and incendiaries accuse us of gorging
rottenness, and battening on corruption. We don't do anything of the
sort, that I see, to a greater extent than other professions, which
are allowed to be highly respectable. Political, military, naval,
university, and clerical parties, of great eminence, defend abuses in
their several lines when profitable. We can't do better than follow
such good examples. Let us stick up for business, and--I was going to
say--leave society to take care of itself. No; that is just what we
should endeavor to prevent society from doing. The world is growing
too wise for us gentlemen. Accordingly, this Interments Bill, by
which our interests are so seriously threatened, has been brought into
Parliament. We must join heart and hand to defeat and crush it. Let us
nail our colors--which I should call the black flag--to the mast, and
let our war-cry be, "No surrender!" or else our motto will very soon
be, "Resurgam;" in other words, it will be all up with us. We stand in
a critical position in regard to public opinion. In order to determine
what steps to take for protecting business, we ought to see our
danger. I wish, therefore, to state the facts of our case clearly to
you; and I say let us face them boldly, and not blink them. Therefore,
I am going to speak plainly and plumply on this subject.

There is no doubt--between ourselves--that what makes our trade so
profitable is the superstition, weakness, and vanity of parties.
We can't disguise this fact from ourselves, and I only wish we may
be able to conceal it much longer from others. As enlightened
undertakers, we must admit that we are of no more use on earth than
scavengers. All the good we do is to bury people's dead out of sight.
Speaking as a philosopher--which an undertaker surely ought to be--I
should say that our business is merely to shoot rubbish. However, the
rubbish