"Blood Money To Whitechapel"
George Bernard Shaw
The Star, September 24th 1888.
BLOOD MONEY TO WHITECHAPEL.
O
TO THE EDITOR OF "THE STAR."
SIR,-- Will you allow
me to make a comment on the success of the Whitechapel murderer in calling
attention for a moment to the social question? Less than a year
ago the West-end press, headed by the St. James's Gazette, the Times,
and the Saturday Review, were literally clamering for the blood
of the people--hounding on Sir Charles Warren to thrash and muzzle the
scum who dared to complain that they were starving--heaping insult and
reckless calumny on those who interceded for the victims--applauding to
the skies the open class bias of those magistrates and judges who zealously
did their very worst in the criminal proceedings which followed--behaving,
in short as the proprietary class always does behave when the workers throw
it into a frenzy of terror by venturing to show their teeth. Quite lost
on these journals and their patrons were indignant remonstrances, argument,
speeches, and sacrifices, appeals to history, philosophy, biology, economics,
and statistics; references to the reports of inspectors, registrar generals,
city missionaries, Parliamentary commissions, and newspapers; collections
of evidence by the five senses at every turn; and house-to-house investigations
into the condition of the unemployed, all unanswered and unanswerable,
and all pointing the same way. The Saturday Review was still frankly
for hanging the appellants; and the Times denounced them as "pests
of society." This was still the tone of the class Press as lately
as the strike of the Bryant and May girls. Now all is changed. Private
enterprise has succeeded where Socialism failed. Whilst we conventional
Social Democrats were wasting our time on education, agitation, and organisation,
some independent genius has taken the matter in hand, and by simply murdering
and disembowelling four women, converted the proprietary press to an inept
sort of communism. The moral is a pretty one, and the Insurrectionists,
the Dynamitards, the Invincibles, and the extreme left of the Anarchist
party will not be slow to draw it. "Humanity, political science, economics,
and religion," they will say, "are all rot; the one argument
that touches your lady and gentleman is the knife." That is so
pleasant for the party of Hope and Perseverance in their toughening struggle
with the party of Desperation and Death!
However, these things have to be faced. If the line to be taken is that
suggested by the converted West-end papers--if the people are still to
yield up their wealth to the Clanricarde class, and get what they can back
as charity through Lady Bountiful, then the policy for the people is plainly
a policy of terror. Every gaol blown up, every window broken, every shop
looted, every corpse found disembowelled, means another ten pound note
for "ransom." The riots of 1886 brought in £78,000
and a People's Palace; it remains to be seen how much these murders may
prove worth to the East-end in panem et circenses. Indeed, if the
habits of duchesses only admitted of their being decoyed into Whitechapel
back-yards, a single experiment in slaughterhouse anatomy on an artistocratic
victim might fetch in a round half million and save the necessity of sacrificing
four women of the people. Such is the stark-naked reality of these abominable
bastard Utopias of genteel charity, in which the poor are first to be robbed
and then pauperised by way of compensation, in order that the rich man
may combine the idle luxury of the protected thief with the unctuous self-satisfaction
of the pious philanthropist.
The proper way to recover the rents of London for the people of London
is not by charity, which is one of the worst curses of poverty, but by
the municipal rate collector, who will no doubt make it sufficiently clear
to the monopolists of ground value that he is not merely taking round the
hat, and that the State is ready to enforce his demand, if need be. And
the money thus obtained must be used by the municipality as the capital
of productive industries for the better employment of the poor. I submit
that this is at least a less disgusting and immoral method of relieving
the East-end than the gust of bazaars and blood money which has suggested
itself from the West-end point of view.--Yours, &c.,
