In the case of the late horrifying murders in Whitechapel, some persons have alleged that the Coroner's Court exceeded its legal function by making an unnecessarily exhaustive inquiry. There can be no doubt that occasionally such a complaint is well founded. Where there is a prisoner in custody in suspicion of having committed the murder, it is manifestly absurd, although the practice is common enough, for precisely the same evidence to be given day after day both before the police magistrate and the coroner. In such a case the Coroner's Court has sufficiently done its duty when it has ascertained the cause of death, and, as Mr. Rowland Williams aptly remarks, has preserved the evidences of the crime, if any exist. In the case, however, of the Whitechapel butcheries, matters were altogether different. No one was arrests against whom sufficient evidence was adduced to warrant his examination in a police court, and therefore the Coroner's Court afforded the only legal machinery available for collecting sworn evidence which might assist the police in their search for the criminal. As regards the action of the police, there is a tendency in some quarters to sneer at the efficiency of our detective arrangements because the person or persons by whom these terrible crimes have been committed are still at large. But surely this is very unreasonable, seeing that the police are men, like ourselves, possessed of no preternatural powers. Murderers who escape immediate seizure are usually ultimately captured, either because there has been some previous acquaintance between them and their victim, or through their attempts to dispose of the plunder they have acquired. But so long as it was supposed - and not unnaturally - that the Whitechapel murderer was actuated by a simple lust for homicide, it was plain that he might escape without leaving any serviceable clue behind him. The medical evidence, however, throws a different light in the matter. It seems pretty certain that this forlorn creature, Annie Chapman, was killed for a mercenary motive - a motive resembling, yet even exceeding in atrocity, the villainies perpetrated by the notorious Burke and Hare sixty years ago.
