The largest of the working-men's clubs are burial
clubs. Ten pounds are usually allowed for the funeral of a husband, and
five pounds for the funeral of a wife. As much as fifteen, twenty,
thirty, and even forty pounds, are occasionally expended on a mechanic's
funeral, in cases where the deceased has been a member of several clubs,
on which occasions the undertakers meet and "settle" between them their
several shares in the performance of the funeral. It is not unusual to
insure a child's life in four or five of these burial clubs; and we have
heard of a case where one man had insured payments in no fewer than
nineteen different burial clubs in Manchester!
When the working-man, in whose family a death has occurred, does not
happen to be a member of a burial club, he is still governed by their
example, and has to tax himself seriously to comply with the usages of
society, and give to his wife or child a respectable funeral. Where it
is the father of the family himself who has died, the case is still
harder. Perhaps all the savings of his life are spent in providing
mourning for his wife and children at his death. Such an expense, at
such a time, is ruinous, and altogether unjustifiable.
Does putting on garments of a certain colour constitute true mourning?
Is it not the heart and the affections that mourn, rather than the
outside raiment? Bingham, in speaking of the primitive Christians, says
that "they did not condemn the notion of going into a mourning habit for
the dead, nor yet much approve of it, but left it to all men's liberty
as an indifferent thing, rather commending those that either omitted it
wholly, or in short laid it aside again, as acting more according to the
bravery and philosophy of a Christian.
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