How certain was Mac?

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

The Times, 29th November 1888 -



Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

To Simon

Yes, that's right.

Druitt functioned after the 'awful glut' at Miller's Ct. And very effectively too, he and his brother winning this case for the Tory Party.

For he was, as Mac writes, a 'Protean' maniac; capable of appearing quite normal though his 'body' was probably as 'diseased' as his mind.

Inexplicably to his other, normal life, Druitt, in the wake of this success he took his own life around Dec 1st to the 3rd.

In my opinion Macnaghten could not place the date so baldly as that because it would go against his assurances to be discreet (to the family) and would tip off Sims that he had been quite misled (which Littlechild had tried to show Sims, though the former wrongly thinks the manipulation came from Anderson).

Therefore the compromise was to make it appear that he may have written the 10th when he meant the 9th (sorry Tatcho) while also acknowledging -- for the public under his own name -- that the fiend killed himself 'soon after' and not immediately after as the MP, the Major, and the journalist had handily but inaccurately propagated (whereas the Vicar had been correct about the timing).

This rendered untenable the self-murder in the river as a 'shrieking, raving fiend', and so the Thames was anti-climactically dropped -- though we know that Mac knew that that is in fact where, and how, Druitt killed himself.

In 1914, Macnaghten gives us a glimpse into the truth which we can verify from other sources, like the one you posted.

That the murderer had an 'awful glut' against that poor young, woman. Initially he went home as he had done before. He did not live in a madhouse nor lodgings, in the conventional sense. Nor did he live alone as implied by Sims' profile of the affluent recluse. He lived with 'his own people' (which sounds like family, but is craftily ambiguous) and they subsequently discovered that he had 'absented himself'; eg. he was missing (a neat compression of Druitt's legal chambers and the school at which he lived).

Mac shapes the data to try and 'keep everyone satisfied' and thus must not be taken literally with every element (I don't think he really thought the graffiti was by Druitt, or that there was a police witness -- but rather knew Lawende had seen the many-faced Oxonian).

For example, Mac would have known very well that Sir Charles Warren did not resign just because of the Ripper, but it makes for a more literary flourish with which to end the chapter having denied us the Thames finale -- and in terms of hyperbolic short-hand is not totally untrue either (plus Warren and Matthews are not named).

Whereas, his seemingly off-hand comment that he joined the Force 'six months' after the Ripper killed himself is correct almost to the day. He alerts the reader in his preface, rarely analysed and not available on Casebook, to not accept that the Whitechapel case was one his two greatest disappointments. eg. That he was not completely 'too late'.

That is my interpretation.

Macnaghten informed the public, both anonymously through significant writers and later by himself, that the Ripper was a mentally tormented, English bourgeoisie. That remains a vivid and strong through-line between the MP's 'doctrine' and Mac's certainty about this 'remarkable man' in 1913/14 (except that Mac knew that the murder and self-murder did not take place within mere hours).

Much of modern 'Ripperology' is a skyscraper built on sand; that a competent and detail-retentive police chief knew less about his preferred suspect than we do.

[Simon Wood]

Hi Jonathan,

Nicely fielded.

Time to fess up and admit that Melville Leslie Macnaghten talked more bollocks about Montague John Druitt than he did about Michael Ostrog—him of the iron-clad alibi.

And I won't even begin to mention his Polish Jew.

Regards,

Simon

[Jonathan H]

Thanks Simon

I think that is also a perfectly reasonable interpretation of a deceitful source.

I too think Mac knew that Ostrog had an iron-clad alibi, and I think he knew that Aaron Kosminski was a minor suspect from an 1888 list, whom he would have to 'sex' up, and did.

I think Mac also in Sims, 1907, got the [un-named] Kosminski family off Anderson's hook -- not that they knew it -- by claiming that the 'suspect' lived alone. He had to re-fictionalise Kosminski, adding the bit about 'anatomical knoweldge' care of a Polish hospital, because he was going to assert a correct timeline for him as well: eg. too long at large to be the killer before he was sectioned for waving a knife at a female relative:

'The first man was a Polish Jew of curious habits and strange disposition, who was the sole occupant of certain premises in Whitechapel after night-fall. This man was in the district during the whole period covered by the Whitechapel murders, and soon after they ceased certain facts came to light which showed that it was quite possible that he might have been the Ripper. He had at one time been employed in a hospital in Poland. He was known to be a lunatic at the time of the murders, and some-time afterwards he betrayed such undoubted signs of homicidal mania that he was sent to a lunatic asylum.''The policeman who got a glimpse of Jack in Mitre Court said, when some time afterwards he saw the Pole, that he was the height and build of the man he had seen on the night of the murder.'

Mac could not have anticipated, I think, that Anderson's failing memory -- which by the late 1900's was misremembering Harcourt the Liberal for Matthews the Tory, and 1891-and-1895, for 1888-and-1889, and McKenzie's pipe for the one at Mary Kelly's -- would substitute Sadler for the masturbating Pole 'confronting' Lawende, having correctly replacing the non-existent cop with the Jewish witness seeing him 'some time afterwards'.

And maybe the whole propaganda parlour game is an elaborate deflection from Tumblety, anyhow.

On the other hand, the 1891 MP bridging sources argue decisively in favour of Druitt's culpability beginning, not with a sly police chief, but rather among the killer's own family.

Have you ever consdiered, just considered, that the North Country Vicar might be talking about Druitt and what the implications of that would be?

[Jonathan H]

To Simon

I don't mean that previous question to be interrogative.

I respect your opinion as a measured analyst trying to fit the meagre bits together into a coherent whole.

Nor do I expect you to agree, of course, with my own opinion that of this source as too coincidental to not be Druitt.

I am just curious as to what you make of the 'North Country Vicar' tale of 1899, both in terms of the parallel hypothesi: that it is about Druitt, and that it is not about Druitt -- and which is more likely than the other?

[Jonathan H]

To Simon

I think you once wrote that the Vicar was a kind of publicity stunt for the Griffiths' book? A very interesting idea, but were you being serious?

You mentioned Ostrog. Here is what Mac deployed via Griffiths in 1898:

' ... The second possible criminal was a Russian doctor, also insane, who had been a convict both in England and Siberia. This man was in the habit of carrying about surgical knives and instruments in his pockets; his antecedents were of the very worst, and at the time of the Whitechapel murders he was in hiding, or, at least, his whereabouts were never exactly known. ...'

And in Sims in 1907, where the un-named Ostrog is part of theory one, the drowned doctor, as a minor suppoorting figire -- alone with the Polish Jew -- whereas the other major theory is allegdledy about a young, American medico:

'The second man was a Russian doctor, a man of vile character, who had been in various prisons in his own country and ours. The Russian doctor who at the time of the murders was in Whitechapel, but in hiding as it afterwards transpired, was in the habit of carrying surgical knives about with him. He suffered from a dangerous form of insanity, and when inquiries were afterwards set on foot he was found to be in a criminal lunatic asylum abroad. He was a vile and terrible person, capable of any atrocity.

Both (Ostrog and Kosminski) these men were capable of the Ripper crimes, but there is one thing that makes the case against each of them weak.

They were both alive long after the horrors had ceased, and though both were in an asylum, there had been a considerable time after the cessation of the Ripper crimes during which they were at liberty and passing about among their fellow men.'

To me all this mixture of fact and fiction (surgical knives?) both enhances the defller of Eton, and conceals him.

It also shows cognition on Mac's part that he learned that Ostrog had been in a French asylum at the time of the murders, and reshaped that data to suit his propagandist purposes -- whilse also trying to debunk/exonerate these pari of 'suspects'.

That line about '... alive long after ...' is once more cognition by Mac via Sims, that he knew what Anderson and/or Swanson did not; that 'Kosminski' did not die soon after the Kelly murder.

[Jonathan H]

Facts into Fiction?

Here is a debate on the other site about another writer's theorizing -- like myself -- that Macnaghten falsified Druitt's details, up to a point, in 'Aberconway'.

http://www.jtrforums.com/showthread.php?t=15235

One poster makes the mistake of claiming that Mac's Report was not for public consumption, so why would he bother?

As I have been saying for years, it is not grasped by some that the contents of 'Aberconway' was disseminated for the public via Griffiths and Sims, and in significantly modified form by Mac himself in 1914.

So, Mac is writing for the public.

With Sims he added more fictional details, though based on real facts Druitt, in the 1900's, but veiled and exaggerated.

The posters do not consider that we know the Druitt 'family' were turned into 'friends' in Griffiths' adaptation of 'Aberconway', and that Mac knew this was not true as he never corrected Sims about making the same 'error'.

If the family were so disguised, then why not their actual member who was Jack the Ripper?

[m_w_r]

One poster makes the mistake of claiming that Mac's Report was not for public consumption, so why would he bother?

As I have been saying for years, it is not grasped by some that the contents of 'Aberconway' was disseminated for the public via Griffiths and Sims, and in significantly modified form by Mac himself in 1914.

So, Mac is writing for the public.

Hi Jonathan,

You've gone into this much more thoroughly than I have, but I'd be interested to know how, in February 1894, Macnaghten could possibly have thought that he was 'writing for the public'. The fact that his views were later disseminated publicly doesn't imply that he thought that the Memorandum was, or was likely to become, a 'public' document at the time he wrote it. In fact, he plainly seems to have thought that the document was 'Confidential'.

I'd beware of pinning your colours to Thomas Toughill's mast in this case, if I were you. His critique of the sources is not to be compared with yours.

Regards,

Mark

[Jonathan H]

'Substantial truth in fictitious form'

To m_w_r

Thanks for the reply and engaging me in debate.

I don't 'pin my colours' to anybody except myself and, with qualifications, the late Tom Cullen.

My counter-thesis goes like this, trying be to be succinct.

In Feb. 1894, Macnaghten, the only Scotland Yard police officer to know anything about the 'West of England' MP's suspect -- whom Mac, like Farquharson, really believed was the Ripper -- watched with concern as the Cutbush so-called scoop-scandal rolled out in the tabloids.

Mac knew there was nothing to it, but his fear was that this tale would cause questions in the House of Commons, and that this might trigger the Druitt story to spill out of Dorset, or that Liberal MP's might recall from 1891 about a certain loose-lipped,Tory backbencher claiming it was a deceased surgeon's son in his own constituency.

So, the official version of the 'Report' was prepared knowing that its contents -- though not the names -- might be talked about in the House by Home Sec. H H Asquith. It was unlikely that a Tory would ask about one of their own problems-embarrassments, but a Liberal Radical might put the Cabinet Sec. under pressure?

Also, Macnaghten decided that it would be useful to have Druitt's name on file in case the story ever broke again, as it had in 1891.

To mask how important this suspect was, eg. he's the fiend, Mac had Druitt downplayed as a minor, hearsay suspect who may, or may not have been a surgeon. Two other minor suspects were roped in to to make Druitt appear merely one on a list of unlikelies. Also the 'awful glut' criteria was deployed: this 'sexually insane' Englishman was a better bet than Cutbush because he killed himself perhaps the same night as the Kelly horror.

And who wouldn't, right?

As it was, the Cutbush story did not get tabloid traction and Mac mothballed the Home Office Report (never requested and never sent) into the Yard's archive where it remained an unknown document until 1966.

But if the Druitt story, if the whole thing, was exposed at least Scotland Yard could claim to have investigated this suspect and found the evidence lacking -- despite the family's 'belief'.

This is quite a fib because, as Mac admitted in his 1914 memoirs, [the un-named] Druitt did not come to police attention until 'some years after' he killed himself. Therefore it had nothing to do with a lack of evidence -- the suspect was permanently beyond the reach of earthly justice.

In 1898, Macnaghten decided to influence Major Griffiths and his big book on the history of crime and the police.

I theorise that Mac removed the 'Report' from the archive and rewrote it to suit his literary cronies, so that the public could know the essential truth: the fiend was one of us, not one of them. This was also his first salvo against Anderson who had latched onto the 'Kosminski' red herring as real and definitive.

That 'Aberconway' is the 'sexed-up' version, one perfect for credulous cronies, is clear from the text: Druitt is without doubt a middle-aged doctor from Blackheath and who had a train ticket which put him within striking distance of the East End; 'Kosminski' may have been seen by a beat cop talking with a victim; Michael Ostrog carried surgical knives and was habitually cruel to women (and unlike Anderson, Mac knows that 'Kosminski' is still alive).

If the North Country Vicar's revelation of 1899 is the fictionalised re-emergence of the Druitt tale, then 'Aberconway' helped quash that voice. For Sims' clincher is that the Vicar's Ripper killed himself some time after the Kelly atrocity, whereas the real 'Jack' took his own life immediately.

Of course the Vicar's Ripper matches Druitt better than the figure in Grffiths and Sims -- yet we know that the latter is about Druitt.

Nobody but a very small group realised that the 'Drowned Doctor's' debut in 1898 was the rebooting, and discreet reshaping, of the MP's 1891 tale, but with the MP, Dorset, and that the maniac was a surgeon's son out, and with the method and location of the suicide in.

Whatever order in which they were composed, 'Aberconway' is a propagandist document, ready for launch on the public at some point and hustled to safe literary pals as a definitive document of state -- when it was no such thing (Sims, 1903).

[auspirograph]

Caveat Emptor

Hi Jonathan,

You've gone into this much more thoroughly than I have, but I'd be interested to know how, in February 1894, Macnaghten could possibly have thought that he was 'writing for the public'. The fact that his views were later disseminated publicly doesn't imply that he thought that the Memorandum was, or was likely to become, a 'public' document at the time he wrote it. In fact, he plainly seems to have thought that the document was 'Confidential'.

I'd beware of pinning your colours to Thomas Toughill's mast in this case, if I were you. His critique of the sources is not to be compared with yours.

Regards,

Mark

I'm not sure that makes any sense.

The Macnaghten Memo was indeed written as an internal police document to the knowledge of the Commissioner in readiness for use by the Home Secretary in response to The Sun Cutbush allegations in the House of Commons.

But in the event that the document was used in Parliament, it would by default become lodged in the public sphere and with Parliamentary journalists and the Hansard records, its details would have become common knowledge well before Griffiths' publication.

Macnaghten, Swanson and Anderson would certainly have been mindful of that.

No, I disagree. The official police line by 1894 was intended, politics being what they are, to advance an official stance that the Cutbush episode offered to prevent the new Liberal administration from delving further into police handling of the Whitechapel murders case. I say this because the evidence to support its details are thin and nebulous enough to suggest a political whitewash.

Why would they do that if all we had here was a simple case of a series of brutal murders on the streets of East End London? Certainly the failure to capture Jack the Ripper was a political failure of the Tory Home Secretary and Scotland Yard officials but who really cared when the Salibury government was no longer in power?

The answer to that is that Anderson cared enough to publicly promote his Polish Jew suspect in 1910 while sitting Liberal Home Secretary Winston Churchill was reviewing his pension and Macnaghten was tying up loose ends in his memoirs, as Jonathan H has been outlining.

I have also outlined an unknown case of a contempt of court proceedings at the Parnell Special Commission regarding the Whitechapel murders from late 1888 into 1889 involving the Oxford University Unionist League in my latest book, Jack the Ripper and Black Magic: Victorian Conspiracy Theories, Secret Societies and the Supernatural Mystique of the Whitechapel Murders. I think that this contempt case is an additional precursor to the Farquharson press allegations.

Further to this discussion, here is Thomas Toughill's response to the authors of The Complete Jack the Ripper A-Z:



I am the author of The Ripper Code and I have a question for the authors of this work.

I carried out what I believe to be profoundly important research into the prime suspect, Montague John Druitt, and the "sexual insanity" attributed to him in the Scotland Yard files by the policeman, Melville Macnaghten. In the paperback edition of my book, I included a new chapter on Druitt in which I explained the significance of my discovery that Druitt was barred from the prestigious Oxford Union when he arrived at Oxford in 1876.

My logic is as follows:-

Druitt was barred from the Union because he was already displaying signs of that "sexual insanity".

His fellow students would have known this. Foremost amongst them for the purposes of this case is Evelyn Ruggles Brise who knew Druitt not just as an Oxford student but also as a cricketer. In fact, the two men sat the Civil Service Examination together. Ruggles Brise got through; Druitt did not.

Ruggles Brise, I suggest, is Macnaghten's prime source on Druitt. At the time of the Ripper murders, Ruggles Brise was the Private Secretary to the Home Secretary, in which capacity he routinely liaised with senior police officers. (In any case, Ruggles Brise and Macnaghten were Old Etonians.)

At Oxford, Ruggles Brise was a member of the Vincent's Club, the University club for Blues and Sportsmen, along with Thomas Seymour Tuke, the owner of the Manor House Asylum in Chiswick close to where Druitt's body was dragged from the Thames on the last day of 1888.

There, I suggest, is the identity of the doctor who declared Druitt "sexually insane", namely Druitt's Oxford contemporary, Thomas Tuke. There too is an explanation as to where Druitt went after being sacked from his school in Blackheath. Druitt sought help from Tuke in Chiswick and when he failed to obtain that he threw himself into the Thames.

Here is my question for the authors of this book.

You describe your work as "The Complete Jack the Ripper". Why then did you not include my Druitt research?

[Jonathan H]

Interesting thoughts, auspirograph.

I must get your book, asap.

For myself I think that Toughill is probably off-track in his theory as to Macnaghten's source of 'private information'.

This is because he seems to think that the 'private information' about Druitt as a Ripper suspect and/or as 'sexually insane' dates from 1888, or early 1889.

Whereas I think the stronger theory is that, as Mac concedes in his 1914 memoir, such information about Druitt arrived 'some years after' and that this timing fits with the Feb 1891 leak about Tory MP Farquharson and his suicided surgeon's son. He has picked up this story from being geographically close to a wing of the Druitt family, a few miles down the road in Dorset, and that they are fellow members of the 'better classes' and Gentiles, Anglicans, and Tories.

Furthermore, the memoirs, and the new source on Farquharson, and the 1892 press mention of his actual name, all show Scotland Yard rejecting the politician's 'doctrine'. Anderson never mentions it in any extant record, Littlechild has never heard of 'Dr D', Swanson thinks, wrongly, that 'Kosminski' was deceased, and Abberline seems to be talking about a young medical student who was investigated at the time as a Whitechapel suspect, whereas Druitt was neither.

But we know that Macnaghten, rightly or wrongly, accepted the family's 'belief' and that his nearest and dearest are the origin of the extraordinary notion of Druitt as Jack.

I theorise that since nobody could be arrested yet a 'good' family could be destroyed, Mac handled this information with great discretion, but he also in 1898 began disseminating this solution to the public but in such a form that Druitt could not be found -- and he wasn't.

[auspirograph]

Interesting thoughts, auspirograph.

I must get your book, asap.

For myself I think that Toughill is probably off-track in his theory as to Macnaghten's source of 'private information'.

Thanks for that Jonathan,

Certainly it's all speculative, perhaps an informative delve into the unknown Jack the Ripper and telling that Farquharson's take was not taken up and 'rejected'.

What's your take then on the Ruggles Brise addition to the mix? Tuke has certainly been a point worth mentioning before on Druitt. I'm surprised that the modern forensics advocates on the Whitechapel murders have historically not taken much notice of Druitt as a 'sexually insane' suspect who fits the bill and possible timing.

[Jonathan H]

'Laying the Ghost ...'

To auspirograph

Based on the little we have I don't think Ruggles Brise or Tuke have anything to do with it.

Apparently, even in the official version of his Report, in which Druitt is almost nothing, Macnaghten had it put on the official record that he was definitely 'sexually insane': that is he gained erotic pleasure and climax from acts of violence, or at least watching them (like Nero -- Mac, 1914).

That is quite a paradox. He's a minor suspect -- but better than Cutbush -- yet his family 'believed that he was the Ripper and he was turned on by violence against harlots (Sims, 1907) and probably had diseased body as well as mind (Mac, 1914).

All these other characters dragged in are, I think, based on the old paradigm that Macnaghten had no direct contact with the druitt family, a paradigm I argue is redundant.

The critical aspect to absorb is that the timing of Druitt's death is not convenient. It was two years too early, and as far as the 'awful glut' thesis goes, his self-murder was not the same night as the final murder. This has to be Kelly rather than Coles, a substantial embarrassment.

It is Mac's belief in Druitt's culpability, rightly or wrongly, which cemented the so-called 'canonical five' from the public's point of view in 1898. He was backdating police cognition of Druitt as a suspect, while in 1914 he conceded that it was not really true.

We can see from the way the police hunted Sadler that it was never true. that it was an institutionally and politically self-serving redaction to save face -- just as William Le Queux spotted in 1898.

Yet this redaction by Mac in his Report(s), and via his cronies -- but not his memoirs -- misleads researchers to this day, who refuse to consider that the murderer's identity became known to a police chief but the revelation being years late (because it was entirely posthumous) meant that Macnaghten's dilemma of 1891 as to what to do had just begun.

Macnaghten claimed that it was not a mystery, and had not been one, for him, 'some years after' the killer killed himself and thus Jack's ghost had been 'laid' to rest.

Sir Melville was a hands-on, highly regarded, senior police figure -- and one obsessed with the Ripper. Like the Druitt family and MP Farquharson he was as certain as you could be without actually catching 'that remarkable man' red-handed.

What if he was right?

[Trevor Marriott]

Jonathan

To auspirograph

Based on the little we have I don't think Ruggles Brise or Tuke have anything to do with it.

Apparently, even in the official version of his Report, in which Druitt is almost nothing, Macnaghten had it put on the official record that he was definitely 'sexually insane': that is he gained erotic pleasure and climax from acts of violence, or at least watching them (like Nero -- Mac, 1914).

That is quite a paradox. He's a minor suspect -- but better than Cutbush -- yet his family 'believed that he was the Ripper and he was turned on by violence against harlots (Sims, 1907) and probably had diseased body as well as mind (Mac, 1914).

All these other characters dragged in are, I think, based on the old paradigm that Macnaghten had no direct contact with the druitt family, a paradigm I argue is redundant.

The critical aspect to absorb is that the timing of Druitt's death is not convenient. It was two years too early, and as far as the 'awful glut' thesis goes, his self-murder was not the same night as the final murder. This has to be Kelly rather than Coles, a substantial embarrassment.

It is Mac's belief in Druitt's culpability, rightly or wrongly, which cemented the so-called 'canonical five' from the public's point of view in 1898. He was backdating police cognition of Druitt as a suspect, while in 1914 he conceded that it was not really true.

We can see from the way the police hunted Sadler that it was never true. that it was an institutionally and politically self-serving redaction to save face -- just as William Le Queux spotted in 1898.

Yet this redaction by Mac in his Report(s), and via his cronies -- but not his memoirs -- misleads researchers to this day, who refuse to consider that the murderer's identity became known to a police chief but the revelation being years late (because it was entirely posthumous) meant that Macnaghten's dilemma of 1891 as to what to do had just begun.

Macnaghten claimed that it was not a mystery, and had not been one, for him, 'some years after' the killer killed himself and thus Jack's ghost had been 'laid' to rest.

Sir Melville was a hands-on, highly regarded, senior police figure -- and one obsessed with the Ripper. Like the Druitt family and MP Farquharson he was as certain as you could be without actually catching 'that remarkable man' red-handed.

A man so obsessed and in the know that he wrote a memo that in itself was inaccurate and therefore unreliable, and then writes in another document material that confirms the innacuracy !

The only one obsessed is you with the beleif that Druitt was involved in any of the murders.
What if he was right?

[Jonathan H]

To Trevor

It's very early here so forgive me if I am slow on the uptake.

I would disgaree that the obesession is mine. I think that Macnaghten knew what he was talking about and that was his solution, not mine. Like a number of people here I am writing (or endlessly rewriting!) a book on the theory I adhere to and so I advocate it -- probing to see where it is flawed or thin.

So far nobody has even laid a glove on it, except for one accomplished and experienced researcher -- no offense, but it's not you -- in private correspondence, and I have dealt with that diabolical counter-argument on another thread (my manuscript contains all the countervailing arguments and so it will be up to the reader).

If it is an obsession then it is one with the likely Jack the Ripper. Is that really such a crime on a Jack the Ripper site?

As for your other point, I don't understand what you are arguing here.

You seem to be conceding, eg. agreeing with me, that Macnaghten acknowledged that material about Druitt he had created was not accurate.

I argue for reasons involving the need for both candour and concealment -- a tricky balancing act but one typical of his affable, managrial style, according to Fred Wensley, which was to try and 'keep everyone satisfied'.

That Griffiths changed 'family' into 'friends' in 1898, and Mac let Sims adopt the same fictional cover, begs two questions:

1. Why would the family of the murderer be deliberately hidden but not the identity of the murderer himself?

2. Is it really just a lucky break for the Druitts that the non-Montie portrait disseminated by Sims -- which is decidely not of a young barrister, an athelete with two jobs who was from Dorset -- because Mac really had an appalling memory despite his reputation for having a formidably retentive one? How fortutious for them.