Page:Our Common Land (and other short essays).djvu/137

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OPEN SPACES.
125

neighbourhood. My letter was never even considered by the meeting. The company in treaty for the ground did not purchase it then, because they thought it irreverent to disturb the dead. Yet although I have again and again seen and written to leading Quakers about it, and addressed several letters to their organ, The Friend, they have deliberately just sold it for building. No builder could be found who liked to buy the ground and disturb the bodies, and the Quakers themselves employed workmen to accomplish the most ghastly unearthing of the contents of the graves, uprooting five thousand bodies, which, I should think, never was undertaken before. They are selling the land for dwellings for the poor, and are excusing themselves by harping on the need of dwellings; but the immediate neighbourhood is to be dealt with under the Artisans Dwellings Bill, by means of which a large number of healthy homes for the poor will be erected, while I fear there is no chance