Tweet
6 October 1888
THE LESSONS OF THE MURDERS
The lesson of the Whitechapel murders does not lie on the surface, and, as usually happens, the most important considerations arising out of this series of night tragedies are the least sensational, and those which are most apt to make the least impression on the public mind. The first thought which arises in the average brain, and perhaps the most natural, is that which fins expression in the formula, Whom shall we hang? - an impulse of anger and an effort to ease responsibility by an act of vengeance which gets rid of the idea of reparation. To deal first with the personal questions involved, we may say that the theory started by the coroner - not altogether without justification on the information conveyed to him - that the work of the assassin was carried out under the impulse of pseudo scientific mania, is exploded by the first attempt ay serious investigation. It is true that inquiries were made at one or two medical schools early last year by a foreign physician, who was spending some time in London, as to the possibility of securing certain parts of the body for the purpose of scientific investigation. No large sum, however, was offered. The person in question was a physician of the highest respectability and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities in his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real foundation for the hypothesis, and the information communicated which was not at all of the nature which the public has been led to believe, was due to the erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard, and to which a negative reply was given. The theory may at once be dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained even by its author. The discovery of the assassin cannot, we believe, long be delayed. He is undoubtedly insane, and, although insane proclivities of this kind are often concealed with great cunning, and are compatible for a time at least with high intelligence and the discharge of the ordinary duties of life in a manner which does not excite suspicion, yet the attendant conditions of mind and the ultimate sequence of mental disease do not fail eventually to produce conditions leading to discovery. Judges, statesmen, and lawyers subject to overwhelming impulses of a cognate kind have discharged the duties of their various stations for a considerable time, while conscious of an almost overwhelming impulse which they have either concealed or made to others the confession. Ordinarily, the remorse and horror which attend the recognition in lucid intervals of the frightful character of these delusions and impulses lead to early confession, and to voluntary precautions taken by such unfortunate persons at the instance of their medical advisers. The acts of butchery which have so shocked and alarmed our population will probably be found to add another terrible chapter to the records of homicidal insanity. It would, however, be most lamentable if this anxious period of mental disturbance, horror, and grief should pass away, leaving behind it only the records of an unprecedented series of crimes, committed under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. There is a much deeper lesson in the story. We do not echo the vague outcry of blame against highly placed officials which usually arises under such circumstances. The true lesson of this catastrophe had been written by the Rev. S.A. Barnett, the vicar of Whitechapel, whose life has been well spent in combatting with marvellous success the terrible conditions of social degradation and public indifference of which these murders are in one sense the outcome and the evidence. What we have to do, then, as inhabitants of a great city greatly disgraced is to seek out the true causes and apply the true remedy. The main features of all these cases may be summed up in very few words. We have here the heavy fringe of a vast population packed into dark places, festering in ignorance, in dirt, in moral degradation, accustomed to violence and crime, born and bred within touch of habitual immorality and coarse obscenity. That is no news to the inhabitants of London. But the great bulk of the inhabitants content themselves with the consideration that they are not their "brother's keeper;" and so, notwithstanding the vast and successful efforts which Mr Barnett and men like him have made in rebuilding the habitations of the poor, in cleansing the physical filth of the alleys and courts, in leavening the mass of moral ordure with the ferment of unwearying kindness, brotherly solicitude, and personal service, and in illuminating many of the darkest corners of the East End with gleams of light from the higher life of religion, of reason, of literature, and of recreation, there remains the great residuum untouched and unpurified. But the case is not hopeless; it is not even beyond the means of any considerable number of intelligent, benevolent, and right minded persons. Even the efforts of single individuals to do away with the abominable system of farming out wretched tenements to the criminal and degraded classes at high rents, without any inquiry or care for the use to which they are put - have produced vast effects. To Lord Shaftesbury, to the Baroness Burdett Coutts, to the Rothschilds, to Mr Peabody, Octavia Hill, Mr Ruskin, and to Mr Barnett himself and his coadjutors, too numerous to mention and yet far too few to suffice, we owe the sweeping away of nests of crime, filth, and degradation, hotbeds of every social evil, and the substitution of light, cleanliness, purity, and the basis of physical and moral regeneration. No one cognisant of the East End of London during the last twenty years but must be aware of the enormous physical and moral reformation which has been worked in the habitations and in the minds of the people. But much remains to be done. First, we need to recognise that the remaining centres of crime and of misery and of unspeakable degradation must be swept away, and in their place decent habitations provided under supervision such as that which prevails throughout a large part of Mr Barnett's parish of Whitechapel, which provided the means of contact with the poor by persons of intelligence, of just aspirations, of kindly sentiments, desirous and capable of holding friendly communion with their poorer neighbours, and of turning it to good purpose. This means, then, the devotion of some considerable sums of money to rebuilding the worst parts of East London, and it means also the assistance of a much larger number of persons added to the not inconsiderable army of workers whose lives have been blest of late years in the East End by doing good works quietly and with little encouragement, but with vast effect. Their numbers need recruiting by many hundreds, nay, by some thousands; and it is strange indeed that London, with its millions of inhabitants and its untold wealth, cannot be roused now from the apathy which has smitten it, to a sense of public duty and individual responsibility. It is more than a scandal, it is a crime, that there should exist, not in the East End only, but in other quarters of London, dark, unlighted places, the known resort of crime and of vice, and which are left, as it were, as a playground for the worst passions, the most bestial impulses; a sort of assumed safety valve on which it would be dangerous to sit. More light, then, physical and moral, is the second need; and with this quickening sense of social duty should come, and will come of necessity, a very different interpretation by the police of their duties to the community. It is no secret to many that the lowest neighbourhoods and the darkest spots of some parts of the East End have been habitually patrolled by persons anxious to seek out and to heal some of the worst ulcers of civilisation, and these patrols have been increased in number and in frequency during the last few weeks. The stories which they have to tell are of saddening uniformity - uncontrollable brutality; women turned into the streets, and shivering on the stones at night, fleeing from the execrations and the violence of drunken men; men stabbed and bleeding; tragedies and horrors of public obscenity treated by the police as the ordinary incidents of dark alleys, unlighted courts, and low neighbourhoods. The policeman is only human, and not always, of course, the best specimen of humanity. Obscenity and brutality and violence are to him customary incidents on certain night beats, and the punishment or the judicial judgment of such conduct mainly the business of the sufferers, so that such offences only require to be dealt with when the sufferer determines to make a charge. When such a charge is made the policeman who has been all night on duty has to appear next morning in court; he loses his rest, he gets no compensation in money, and gets no credit, the charge - perhaps for the thirtieth time - of some drunken woman or man, with an act of brutality or of public obscenity, is a piece of mournful routine of which he would gain to be relieved. What the neighbourhood tolerates, and what the individual does not insist on resenting, the policeman accordingly passes over in silence, and feels that he ought rather to be congratulated for his tact than condemned for his indifference. Here, then, are three chief defendants in the indictment which this series of murders opens against London. Ourselves, the great public of London, stand first in the dock, convicted by flagrant and horrible proof of indifference to the physical and moral degradation of our fellow citizens; convicted of tolerating darkness, filth, crime, and obscenity as ordinary incidents of metropolitan life; standing aside with intellectual apathy, with pockets closely buttoned, and with minds intent on our own pleasures and businesses, and looking on indifferently at the work of the few devoted toilers who have done so much to redeem London from these horrible disgraces. It is for Londoners to respond to Mr Barnett's appeal for means with which to complete the rebuilding of his parish, and to annihilate the plague spots which still lurk in it. Nor need these contributions be altogether donations in the ordinary sense, since considerable experience has shown that large investments in work of this kind produce a fair and reasonable return for capital. Next, our municipal authorities stand charged with indifference to the lighting, paving, and cleansing of their streets and courts, and with permitting the inhabitants to carry on a traffic prohibited by law, and one which it lies with them to suppress. Lastly, the police need to be quickened by a higher sense of public morality, to be strengthened in number, and to be encouraged and commanded to a much stricter exercise of their ordinary duties as patrols. At present, night charges are rather discouraged - the opposite tendency ought henceforth to prevail. But this is a measure of repression which can only be effectual if it be accompanied and preceded by an unwearying and unstinting effort to remove the conditions under which criminal and degraded conditions arise. While earnestly hoping, therefore, that the secret of these assassinations may, as there is some reason to hope, be quickly unravelled, there remains the yet more ardent desire that the lessons taught by these horrors will be enduring, and will have a fruitful effect on the social well being of the metropolis.
British Medical Journal.
THE LESSONS OF THE MURDERS
The lesson of the Whitechapel murders does not lie on the surface, and, as usually happens, the most important considerations arising out of this series of night tragedies are the least sensational, and those which are most apt to make the least impression on the public mind. The first thought which arises in the average brain, and perhaps the most natural, is that which fins expression in the formula, Whom shall we hang? - an impulse of anger and an effort to ease responsibility by an act of vengeance which gets rid of the idea of reparation. To deal first with the personal questions involved, we may say that the theory started by the coroner - not altogether without justification on the information conveyed to him - that the work of the assassin was carried out under the impulse of pseudo scientific mania, is exploded by the first attempt ay serious investigation. It is true that inquiries were made at one or two medical schools early last year by a foreign physician, who was spending some time in London, as to the possibility of securing certain parts of the body for the purpose of scientific investigation. No large sum, however, was offered. The person in question was a physician of the highest respectability and exceedingly well accredited to this country by the best authorities in his own, and he left London fully eighteen months ago. There was never any real foundation for the hypothesis, and the information communicated which was not at all of the nature which the public has been led to believe, was due to the erroneous interpretation by a minor official of a question which he had overheard, and to which a negative reply was given. The theory may at once be dismissed, and is, we believe, no longer entertained even by its author. The discovery of the assassin cannot, we believe, long be delayed. He is undoubtedly insane, and, although insane proclivities of this kind are often concealed with great cunning, and are compatible for a time at least with high intelligence and the discharge of the ordinary duties of life in a manner which does not excite suspicion, yet the attendant conditions of mind and the ultimate sequence of mental disease do not fail eventually to produce conditions leading to discovery. Judges, statesmen, and lawyers subject to overwhelming impulses of a cognate kind have discharged the duties of their various stations for a considerable time, while conscious of an almost overwhelming impulse which they have either concealed or made to others the confession. Ordinarily, the remorse and horror which attend the recognition in lucid intervals of the frightful character of these delusions and impulses lead to early confession, and to voluntary precautions taken by such unfortunate persons at the instance of their medical advisers. The acts of butchery which have so shocked and alarmed our population will probably be found to add another terrible chapter to the records of homicidal insanity. It would, however, be most lamentable if this anxious period of mental disturbance, horror, and grief should pass away, leaving behind it only the records of an unprecedented series of crimes, committed under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. There is a much deeper lesson in the story. We do not echo the vague outcry of blame against highly placed officials which usually arises under such circumstances. The true lesson of this catastrophe had been written by the Rev. S.A. Barnett, the vicar of Whitechapel, whose life has been well spent in combatting with marvellous success the terrible conditions of social degradation and public indifference of which these murders are in one sense the outcome and the evidence. What we have to do, then, as inhabitants of a great city greatly disgraced is to seek out the true causes and apply the true remedy. The main features of all these cases may be summed up in very few words. We have here the heavy fringe of a vast population packed into dark places, festering in ignorance, in dirt, in moral degradation, accustomed to violence and crime, born and bred within touch of habitual immorality and coarse obscenity. That is no news to the inhabitants of London. But the great bulk of the inhabitants content themselves with the consideration that they are not their "brother's keeper;" and so, notwithstanding the vast and successful efforts which Mr Barnett and men like him have made in rebuilding the habitations of the poor, in cleansing the physical filth of the alleys and courts, in leavening the mass of moral ordure with the ferment of unwearying kindness, brotherly solicitude, and personal service, and in illuminating many of the darkest corners of the East End with gleams of light from the higher life of religion, of reason, of literature, and of recreation, there remains the great residuum untouched and unpurified. But the case is not hopeless; it is not even beyond the means of any considerable number of intelligent, benevolent, and right minded persons. Even the efforts of single individuals to do away with the abominable system of farming out wretched tenements to the criminal and degraded classes at high rents, without any inquiry or care for the use to which they are put - have produced vast effects. To Lord Shaftesbury, to the Baroness Burdett Coutts, to the Rothschilds, to Mr Peabody, Octavia Hill, Mr Ruskin, and to Mr Barnett himself and his coadjutors, too numerous to mention and yet far too few to suffice, we owe the sweeping away of nests of crime, filth, and degradation, hotbeds of every social evil, and the substitution of light, cleanliness, purity, and the basis of physical and moral regeneration. No one cognisant of the East End of London during the last twenty years but must be aware of the enormous physical and moral reformation which has been worked in the habitations and in the minds of the people. But much remains to be done. First, we need to recognise that the remaining centres of crime and of misery and of unspeakable degradation must be swept away, and in their place decent habitations provided under supervision such as that which prevails throughout a large part of Mr Barnett's parish of Whitechapel, which provided the means of contact with the poor by persons of intelligence, of just aspirations, of kindly sentiments, desirous and capable of holding friendly communion with their poorer neighbours, and of turning it to good purpose. This means, then, the devotion of some considerable sums of money to rebuilding the worst parts of East London, and it means also the assistance of a much larger number of persons added to the not inconsiderable army of workers whose lives have been blest of late years in the East End by doing good works quietly and with little encouragement, but with vast effect. Their numbers need recruiting by many hundreds, nay, by some thousands; and it is strange indeed that London, with its millions of inhabitants and its untold wealth, cannot be roused now from the apathy which has smitten it, to a sense of public duty and individual responsibility. It is more than a scandal, it is a crime, that there should exist, not in the East End only, but in other quarters of London, dark, unlighted places, the known resort of crime and of vice, and which are left, as it were, as a playground for the worst passions, the most bestial impulses; a sort of assumed safety valve on which it would be dangerous to sit. More light, then, physical and moral, is the second need; and with this quickening sense of social duty should come, and will come of necessity, a very different interpretation by the police of their duties to the community. It is no secret to many that the lowest neighbourhoods and the darkest spots of some parts of the East End have been habitually patrolled by persons anxious to seek out and to heal some of the worst ulcers of civilisation, and these patrols have been increased in number and in frequency during the last few weeks. The stories which they have to tell are of saddening uniformity - uncontrollable brutality; women turned into the streets, and shivering on the stones at night, fleeing from the execrations and the violence of drunken men; men stabbed and bleeding; tragedies and horrors of public obscenity treated by the police as the ordinary incidents of dark alleys, unlighted courts, and low neighbourhoods. The policeman is only human, and not always, of course, the best specimen of humanity. Obscenity and brutality and violence are to him customary incidents on certain night beats, and the punishment or the judicial judgment of such conduct mainly the business of the sufferers, so that such offences only require to be dealt with when the sufferer determines to make a charge. When such a charge is made the policeman who has been all night on duty has to appear next morning in court; he loses his rest, he gets no compensation in money, and gets no credit, the charge - perhaps for the thirtieth time - of some drunken woman or man, with an act of brutality or of public obscenity, is a piece of mournful routine of which he would gain to be relieved. What the neighbourhood tolerates, and what the individual does not insist on resenting, the policeman accordingly passes over in silence, and feels that he ought rather to be congratulated for his tact than condemned for his indifference. Here, then, are three chief defendants in the indictment which this series of murders opens against London. Ourselves, the great public of London, stand first in the dock, convicted by flagrant and horrible proof of indifference to the physical and moral degradation of our fellow citizens; convicted of tolerating darkness, filth, crime, and obscenity as ordinary incidents of metropolitan life; standing aside with intellectual apathy, with pockets closely buttoned, and with minds intent on our own pleasures and businesses, and looking on indifferently at the work of the few devoted toilers who have done so much to redeem London from these horrible disgraces. It is for Londoners to respond to Mr Barnett's appeal for means with which to complete the rebuilding of his parish, and to annihilate the plague spots which still lurk in it. Nor need these contributions be altogether donations in the ordinary sense, since considerable experience has shown that large investments in work of this kind produce a fair and reasonable return for capital. Next, our municipal authorities stand charged with indifference to the lighting, paving, and cleansing of their streets and courts, and with permitting the inhabitants to carry on a traffic prohibited by law, and one which it lies with them to suppress. Lastly, the police need to be quickened by a higher sense of public morality, to be strengthened in number, and to be encouraged and commanded to a much stricter exercise of their ordinary duties as patrols. At present, night charges are rather discouraged - the opposite tendency ought henceforth to prevail. But this is a measure of repression which can only be effectual if it be accompanied and preceded by an unwearying and unstinting effort to remove the conditions under which criminal and degraded conditions arise. While earnestly hoping, therefore, that the secret of these assassinations may, as there is some reason to hope, be quickly unravelled, there remains the yet more ardent desire that the lessons taught by these horrors will be enduring, and will have a fruitful effect on the social well being of the metropolis.
British Medical Journal.