WHITECHAPEL HORRORS.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 222, 15 November 1888, Page 2

WHITECHAPEL HORRORS.

NO CLUE TO THE MURDERER. AN ADMISSION AND THREATS FROM " JACK, THE RIPPER.” GOVERNMENT STILL REFUSE TO OFFER A REWARD. London, Nov 13. The police have not yet obtained the slightest clue to the perpetrators of the Whitechapel murders. Au open verdict was returned at the inquest on the latest victim of the Whitechapel murders. The police and other people continue to receive letters signed, “Jack, the Ripper,’, admitting that he committed the murders and threatening to commit more shortly. In consequence of these threats the inhabitants of Whitechapel are in a greatly excited state. Mr Matthews, Home Secretary, in reply to a question in the House of Commons, reiterated the refusal to offer a Government reward for the apprehension of the murderer.

The London Morning Post, the organ of the Conservative party, in an article on the condition of the poor in Whitechapel, says now THE POOR MVE. The veil has been drawn aside that covered up the hideous condition in which thousands, tens of thousands, of our fellow-creatures live, in this boasted nineteenth century, and in the very heart of the wealthiest, the healthiest, the most civilised city in the world. The daily sins, the nightly agonies, the hourly sorrows, that haunt and poison and corrupt the ill-fa’ed tenants and sojourners in these homes of degradation and disease have been again and again described with more or less truth and force by our popular writers ; but it is when some crime or accident, more than usually horrible, has given vividness and reality to the previously unrealised picture, that we are brought to ask why sleeps the thunder, and how these things can bo 1

A BAMPLB SLUM. The answer is in the facts disclosed. Take the latest as asamp'eof the rest, A wretched back street is crowded with houses of the most miserable class. Nearly all of them are let out in lodgings of a single room, or part of a room. The house where the murder was committed had no less than six families, all toilers for daily brel—some of questionable honesty or sobriety—and all, we may be sure, contaminated in greater or less degree by the vicious surroundings of their distressful home. Loose women have as free run in these abodes as rabbits in a warren. There is continual Coming and going. Precepts of decency are not observed, the standard of propriety is low, the whole moral atmosphere is pestilential, Poverty in its direst form haunts some dwellings, ghastly profligacy defiles others, and this in street after street, alley after alley, cut de sac] after cut de sac, garret after garret, and cellar after cellar. Amid such gross surroundings who can be good? With this atrocious miasma continually brooding over them, and settling down among them, who can rise .to anything better ? Morally, those people are not only lost—they are dead and buried. CWMOVRISa FOB IMMEDIATE CONSIDERATION. This is the part of the subject that clamours -for immediatejeonsideration, these are miseries that need immediate remedy, these are the lamentable conditions of human existence, which may well tax the wisest counsels and the most philanthropic consideration of the best men and women of the day. Side by side with all the luxury, the ease, the magnificence, and abounding plenty of our vast metropolis, are all - these pitiable ground-down people bowed with misery and steeped with crime. It is not so much the truncheon of the policeman that is wanted as the wand, magical in its power and healing in its .touch, of higher moral ministries—some centres at intervals in their very midst where the gentle ministrations of Christain love shall never be sought hy the weary and heavy laden in vain, where the veriest outcast may knock and feel that there at least are pitying hearts and open hands, the instruments of Godin the recovery of man,