THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9219, 23 November 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1888.

The Whitechapel tragedies, which have excited horror throughout the civilised world continue, although the latest case reported in our cable messages happily differs from those previously recorded in that the intended victim escaped with her life. It is also satisfactory to know that the supposed perpetrator of this latest outrage, who is not, however believed to be the original murderer, has been arrested. In referring to the dreadful incidents that are drawing the attention of the whole world to Whitechapel, the Bishop of Liverpool, in addressing the Curates' Society, said that he knew East London intimately, and the clergymen in that district, and could quite understand such tragedies ■ as had horrified the world taking place there. " Men were there living little better than beasts; the state of that district illustrated the opinion of an old divine, that if the man was left to himself he was -devil half-beast." Indeed, a perusal of the proceedings of the Coroner's inquest on one of these murders reveals a condition of society so desperate, so helplessly poor, and so hopelessly degraded, that one hardly wonders at any crime occurring there. One would think that the occurrence of so many murders, and these confined to one particular class of victims, would deter those unhappy women from continuing to expose themselves to danger. But the disclosures which these events have caused of the cruel destitution, the cravings of hunger which a few pennies would appease, of the difficulties in obtaining the humblest and most wretched shelter for the night, explains the dire necessity that impels them to face the horrors to which they are exposed in their wretched calling. If these murders serve no other purpose they will not have been in vain in drawing the attention of the world to a condition of things existing in the East End of London, surpassing anything heretofore imagined of misery and degradation, and such as is a shame to human society. It can readily be understood that the alarm existing in the district is extreme. Even at the date of the last papers to hand, when the murders had not reached their present height, the terror was universal. Hardly anything else was spoken of among the inhabitants. The most ; trifling incident was sufficient to excite a fresh furore of excitement, and canards of the most alarming kind were eagerly believed. Working men in large numbers, organised by the Vigilance Committee, were supplementing the bodies of police and detectives drafted to the district, and were parading the streets during the night; yet, in spite of all this, the murders continue, and the murderer evades detection. That he should continue to confine his murderous operations to the same district, notwithstanding all the excitement and vigilance surrounding him, seems one of the most remarkable features in the whole affair. On the supposition that he is a man possessed of hallucination, and believing himself to have a mission to slay these wretched women ; or assuming that he is excited only by a fiendish thirst for blood; or even supposing that he hoped to make money by traffic in the organs taken from his victims, one might expect that he would change the scene of his operations and fly from a district in which his murderous work must be attended with imminent danger of detection. But no; he began in Whitechapel and in Whitechapel he continues, and one is impelled to the conclusion that his fiendish malignity has a local character, and that it is specially against the women of that district that his enmity is directed. This would seem to accord with the theory based on the statement that a Malay sailor, who alleged that he had been robbed by some of them, had vowed' vengeance against the women of Whitechapel; and on any other supposition than some such

local attraction, it seems unaccountablf that,, surrounded by the hue and cn of an alarmed people, the murderei should still confine the scene of his crimes to Whitechapel. The assump ti°n of the title of "Jack the Ripper 1 seems more like the work of a crue practical joker, who wishes to intensify the horror, than that of the murderei himself ; but the impunity that attends the murderer, whoever he is, is a sorry reflection on the efficiency of the guardianship of the law, under the conditions of lawlessness that reign among the outcasts of society in that great social wilderness which exists in the very heart of the metropolis of the commerce and civilisation of the world.