Page:Our Common Land (and other short essays).djvu/87

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A MORE EXCELLENT WAY OF CHARITY.
75

plant a few flowers, put a few seats? The garden of Lincoln's Inn Fields is certainly kept very lovely; but how few eyes are allowed to see it; Red Lion Square is a howling ugliness; the Board School playgrounds are closed on Saturday;[1] the little graveyard in Drury Lane[2]—half the graveyards in London—are close locked and barred, and left in ugliness too; the Quakers are actually deciding to sell for building purposes their ancient burial-ground near Bunhill Fields.[3] Can they not afford to let the place allotted to their dead be consecrated to the poor and become a place of rest to the weary living before their pilgrimage is over? Money, money, money, to spend where we see its effect in parks, or villas, or cosy suburban houses, and not a glimpse of what we might do with it in the districts where the poor live and die.

  1. Eighteen of these are now to be opened.
  2. Now open to the public, and planted as a garden.
  3. Since sold for building.