Burial Societies are friendly societies constituted in the usual manner, and with the express object of supplying a fund for paying the funeral expenses of the members on their death (see
FRIENDLY SOCIETIES). It became customary to enter the names not only of adults, but of children, in such societies. The proceedings of the criminal courts have shown that, in some instances, children on whose lives such an insurance was effected have been killed or allowed to die of neglect, and the alarm created by such instances was enhanced by the discovery that children were frequently insured in more than one society. To obviate this calamitous use of a beneficial arrangement, it was provided that no insurance of a child under six years of age in a burial society should be legal. The Hon. E. Lyulph Stanley, Inspector under the Friendly Societies Act, 1875, says, in a report on Friendly Societies, 1885 (B.B. 89), referring to burial societies: 'I wish to make a general remark on burial societies which has been impressed upon me during this inspection. It is that I am satisfied that there is a large amount of insurance of persons without their knowledge by persons not entitled to insure them, and that in this way frauds are extensively practised on burial societies, and no doubt these are temptations to murder.' On the other hand, in evidence before the Select Committee on Friendly Societies in 1849, it was stated in respect of Liverpool, that in the societies of that city, numbering some 100,000 members, no case of death by violence for the sake of burial money had occurred. In the Friendly Societies Act of 1850, and in that of 1875 (38 and 39 Vict. chap. 60), stringent arrangements for certifying the cause of death have been adopted.