THE "FANTASTIC FAILURE" MUST GO - Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph, as to the reorganization of the Detective force, says that it cannot, while referring to the bounden duty of the Government, shrink from the painful but imperatively necessary task of warning Lord Salisbury that the public are altogether discontented with, and will soon become uncontrollably impatient of, the presence at the Home Office of Mr Matthews. It must be explained that Sir Charles Warren is only Prefect of Police; the Minister, The Fouché, the Savary, the head police functionary of the kingdom, is Mr Matthews. The can no longer be disguised that the Home Secretary now in office is a source of miserable weakness and discredit to the present Administration. In the House of Commons he has been nothing more or less than a fantastic failure. In the provinces he is scarcely known even by name; and when the provincials do become aware of him it is only to mistrust him, and to express disrespectful and indignant astonishment that a Government, otherwise so capable and so popular, should drag with it a dead weight of so much vacillation, so much ineptitude, and so many frankly naïve confessions of crass ignorance concerning things of which the most commonplace Home Secretary ought to be fully cognizant. The Mr Matthews does not know, that he is not aware, that he does not remember, or that he has not heard of things which to any ordinary intelligent man should be as manifest as the sun at noonday, have been Session after Session stereotyped replies of the Home Secretary to the simplest questions. Very likely Mr Matthews is in many respects and excellent gentleman; but it is high time for him to go and excel somewhere else and in some other department than the Home Office.
LIGHT ON THE MURDERED'S MOVEMENTS
The latest reports as to the search for the murderer are not of a hopeful character. A half-Spaniard and half-Bulgarian, who gave the name of Emanuel Delbast Violenia, waited on the police yesterday. He stated that he, his wife, and two children tramped from Manchester to London with the view of being able to emigrate to Australia, and took up their abode in one of the lodging-houses in Hanbury-street. Early last Saturday morning, walking alone along Hanbury-street, he noticed a man and woman quarrelling in a very excited manner. Violenia distinctly heard the man threaten to kill the woman by sticking a knife into her. They passed on and Violenia went to his lodging. After the murder he communicated what he had seen to the police. At one o'clock yesterday afternoon Sergeant Thicke, assisted by Inspector Cansby, placed about a dozen men, the greater portion of whom were Jews, in the yard of the Leman-street police-station. Pizer was then brought out and allowed to place himself among the assembled men. He is a man of short stature, with black whiskers and shaven chin. Violenia was then brought into the yard. Having keenly scrutinized all the faces before him, he went up to Pizer and identified him as the man whom he heard threaten a woman on the night of the murder. Subsequently, cross-examination so discredited Violenia's evidence that it was wholly distrusted by the police, and Pizer was set at liberty.
An important discovery, however, which throws some light upon the movements of the murderer immediately after the committal of the crime, was made yesterday afternoon. In the backyard of the house, 25, Hanbury-street, the next house but one to the scene of the murder, a little girl noticed peculiar marks on the wall and on the ground. She communicated the discovery to Detective-Inspector Chandler, who had just called at the house in order to make a plan of the back of the premises of the three houses for the use of the coroner at the inquest. The whole of the yard was then carefully examined, with the result that a bloody trail was found distinctly marked for a distance of five or six feet in the direction of the back door of the house. Further investigation left no doubt that the trail was that of the murderer, who, it was evident, after finishing his work, had passed through or over the dividing fence between Nos 29 and 27, and thence into the garden of No. 25. On the wall of the last house there was found a curious mark, between a smear and a sprinkle, which had probably been made by the murderer, who, alarmed by the blood-soaked state of his coat, took off that garment and knocked it against the wall. Abutting on the end of the yard of No. 25 are the works of Mr Bailey, a packing case maker. In the yard of this establishment, in an out-of-the-way corner, the police yesterday afternoon found some crumbled paper almost saturated with blood. It was evident that the murderer had found the paper in the yard of 25 and had wiped his hands with it, afterwards throwing it over the wall into Bailey's premises. The general appearance of the bloody trail and other circumstances seem to show that the murderer intended to make his way as rapidly as possible into the street through the house next door but one, being frightened by some noise of light in No. 29 from retreating by the way by which he came.
Some further particulars are forthcoming respecting the strange conduct of Pigott, the man who was apprehended at Gravesend. He was first seen in Gravesend on Sunday afternoon about four o'clock. He then asked four young men, who were standing in the London-road, near Princes-street, where he could get a glass of beer, he having walked from Whitechapel. The young men told him. Following their directions he jumped into a tramcar going towards North-fleet. The young men noticed that he had a bad hand, and that he carried a black bag. He was without this bag when subsequently seen. He left a paper parcel at a fish shop, stating he was going across the water to Tilbury. Instead of doing so he went to the Pope's Head publichouse, where his conversation about his hatred of women aroused suspicion, and led to his being detained by the police authorities. Superintendent Berry found the paper parcel at the fish shop to contain two shirts and a pair of stockings, one of the shirts, a blue striped one, being torn about the breast, and having marks of blood upon it. At the police-station, Pigott first said he knocked down the woman who had bitten his hand in a yard at the back of a lodging-house in Whitechapel, but he subsequently said the occurrence took place in Brick-lane. What has become of the black bag which Pigott was seen to have in Gravesend on Sunday afternoon is not known. Pigott of late years has followed the business of a publican, and seven or eight years ago he was in a good position, giving £8,000 to go into a house at Hoxton.
"NOT HALF ENOUGH IS BEING DONE FOR THE WRETCHED" - Morning Post
The Morning Post, the organ of the Conservative party, has been stirred to write an article on the condition of the poor in Whitechapel, which shows that a murder sometimes touches a heart indifferent to less violent reminders.
Our contemporary says:-
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 civilized in the world. We have all known for many years that deplorable misery, gross crime, and unspeakable vice - mixed and matted together - lie just off the main roads that lead through the industrial quarters of the metropolis. 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, and that we are brought to feel - what our keenest powers failed to adequately to conceive before - how parts of our great capital are honeycombed with cells, hidden from the light of day, where men are brutalized, women are demonized and children are brought into the world only to be inoculated with corruption, reared in terror, and trained in sin, till punishment and shame overtake them too, and thrust them down to the black depths where their parents lie already lost, or dead to every hope or chance of moral recovery and social rescue. Then comes a terrible crime, bringing a revelation that fills every soul with horror, and makes us ask why sleeps the thunder, and how these things can be?
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. The house where the murder was committed had no less than six families, all toilers for daily bread, 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 a 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, cul de sac after cul 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 these people are not only lost - they are dead and buried.
This is the part of the subject that clamours for immediate consideration, these are the 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 case, the magnificence, and abounding plenty or our vast metropolis, are all these pitiable ground-down people bowed with misery, and steeped in crime. Happily there are here and there, like far oft stars in darkest nights, exceptional instances of honesty. What can be done? How shall the help, the sympathy, the succour of the better circumstanced, the wealthy, and the well-to-do, be brought to bear with sweet reclaiming power among these lost ones?
It is not so much the truncheon of the policemen 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 fell that there at least are pitying hearts and open hands, the instruments of God in the recovery man. We take into the reckoning all that is being nobly done for the wretched people, but what we want to urge is that it is not half enough. The saddening sight of pent up misery which the recent four murders disclose confirm our complaint, that the better off classes have not yet risen to the height of self-denial and charity which the hardness of the lot of these close-packed, hard-working, much-suffering poor require to enable them to break through the fetters that bind them down and gall their necks till they fain to let things drift,, while they, like Lazarus in his grave, are without the wish or power to rise to anything better.
