Now here the Metropolitan Interments Bill steps in, and aims at destroying our only chances of keeping up business as heretofore.  We have generally to deal with parties whose feelings are not in a state to admit of their making bargains with us—­a circumstance, on their parts, which is highly creditable to human nature; and favorable to trade.  Thus, in short, gentlemen, we have it all our own way with them.  But this Bill comes between the bereaved party and the undertaker.  By the twenty-seventh clause, it empowers the Board of Health to provide houses and make arrangements for the reception and care of the dead previously to, and until interment; in order, as it explains in a subsequent clause, to the accommodation of persons having to provide the funerals—­supposing such persons to desire the accommodation.  Clause the twenty-eighth enacts “That the said Board shall make provision for the management and conduct, by persons appointed by them, of the funerals of persons whose bodies are to be interred in the Burial Grounds, to be provided under this Act, where the representatives of the deceased, or the persons having the care and direction of the funeral, desire to have the same so conducted; and the said Board shall fix and publish a scale of the sums to be payable for such funerals, inclusive of all matters and services necessary for the same, such sums to be proportioned to the description of the funeral, or the nature of the matter and services to be furnished and rendered for the same; but so that in respect of the lowest of such sums, the funerals may be conducted with decency and solemnity.”  Gentlemen, if this enactment becomes law, we shall lose all the advantages which we derived from bereaved parties’ state of mind.  The Board of Health will take all trouble off their hands, at whatever sum they may choose to name.  Of course they will apply to the Board of Health instead of coming to us.  But what is beyond everything prejudicial to our interests, is the proviso “that in respect of the lowest of such sums, the funerals may be conducted with decency and solemnity.”  Hitherto it has been understood that so much respect could not be paid in the case of what we call a low affair as in one of a certain style.  We have always considered that a funeral ought to cost so much to be respectable at all.  Therefore relations have gone to more expense with us, than they would otherwise have been willing to incur, in order to secure proper respect.  But if proper respect is to be had at a low figure, the strongest hold that we have upon sorrowing relatives will be taken away.