There is something archaic in a community of simple people in their attitude toward death and burial.  There is nothing so easy to collect money for as a funeral, and one involuntarily remembers that the early religious tithes were paid to ward off death and ghosts.  At times one encounters almost the Greek feeling in regard to burial.  If the alderman seizes upon times of festivities for expressions of his good-will, much more does he seize upon periods of sorrow.  At a funeral he has the double advantage of ministering to a genuine craving for comfort and solace, and at the same time of assisting a bereaved constituent to express that curious feeling of remorse, which is ever an accompaniment of quick sorrow, that desire to “make up” for past delinquencies, to show the world how much he loved the person who has just died, which is as natural as it is universal.

In addition to this, there is, among the poor, who have few social occasions, a great desire for a well-arranged funeral, the grade of which almost determines their social standing in the neighborhood.  The alderman saves the very poorest of his constituents from that awful horror of burial by the county; he provides carriages for the poor, who otherwise could not have them.  It may be too much to say that all the relatives and friends who ride in the carriages provided by the alderman’s bounty vote for him, but they are certainly influenced by his kindness, and talk of his virtues during the long hours of the ride back and forth from the suburban cemetery.  A man who would ask at such a time where all the money thus spent comes from would be considered sinister.  The tendency to speak lightly of the faults of the dead and to judge them gently is transferred to the living, and many a man at such a time has formulated a lenient judgment of political corruption, and has heard kindly speeches which he has remembered on election day.  “Ah, well, he has a big Irish heart.  He is good to the widow and the fatherless.”  “He knows the poor better than the big guns who are always talking about civil service and reform.”

Indeed, what headway can the notion of civic purity, of honesty of administration make against this big manifestation of human friendliness, this stalking survival of village kindness?  The notions of the civic reformer are negative and impotent before it.  Such an alderman will keep a standing account with an undertaker, and telephone every week, and sometimes more than once, the kind of funeral he wishes provided for a bereaved constituent, until the sum may roll up into “hundreds a year.”  He understands what the people want, and ministers just as truly to a great human need as the musician or the artist.  An attempt to substitute what we might call a later standard was made at one time when a delicate little child was deserted in the Hull-House nursery.  An investigation showed that it had been born ten days previously in the Cook County hospital, but no trace could be found of the unfortunate mother.