MORAL OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9201, 2 November 1888, Page 6

MORAL OF THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERS.

. ♦ The London Morning Post;, the organ of the Conservative party, in an article on the condition of the poor in Whitechapel, says:— HOW THE POOR LIVE. The veil has been drawn aside that covered up the hideous condition in which thousands, tens of thousands, of our fellowcreatures 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-fated 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 be? A SAMPLE SLUM. The answer is in the facts disclosed. Take the latest as a sample of 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. This house where the murder was committed had no loss than six families, all toilers for daily bread—some of questionable honesty or sobriety—and all, we may bo sure, contaminated in greater or less degree by the vicious surroundings of their distressful homo. Loose women have as free run in these abodes as rabbits in a warren. There is a 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, nd de sac after ail de me,, 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, these people are not only lost—they are dead and buried. CLAMOURING FOR IMMEDIATE CONSIDERATION. This is the part of the subject that clamours for immediate consideration, 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, tho magnificence, and abounding plenty of our vast metropolis, are all these pitiable ground-down people bowed with misery and steeped in 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 Christian love shall never be sought by the weary and heavy laden in vain, where the veriest outcast may knock and feel that there at least are pitying hands and open hands, the instruments of God in the recovery of man.