Alderley and Wilmslow Advertiser
The fearful epidemic of crime which has broken out in the East End of London
seems to have afforded an opportunity for sentimental and gushing writers to
pour the vials of their wrath on the unfortunate heads of the constabulary,
and to charge the Metropolitan police with having allowed the first city of
the world to lapse into primeval savagery. The frightful murders in Whitechapel
indicate an assassin with the cunning of a madman and the heart of a brute, and
reveal a nature so foul and so dominated by animal-ism that we can only hope for
the sake of humanity the fiendish crimes may be traced to one irresponsible for
his actions. A London journal is accountable for the statement - which we find
rather a big pill to swallow - that a police official told a representative of
the Press quite coolly that the police would never detect such crimes as the
Whitechapel murders, and that the only thing to do was to let the man-monster
go on murdering people till his homicidal mania wore off or wore him out. The
same authority, in the most serious manner possible, expresses its regret that
this individual only too faithfully reflects the spirit of fatalism and
pessimism that is demoralizing the detective department. Surely it may be
safely assumed that the police authorities are doing their utmost to find the
author of the ghastly murders, and it is a pity that they should be hampered
by the vapid nonsense indulged in by writers who seem ever ready to turn their
pen in whichever direction the tide turns. They would have been the first,
doubtless, had the murderer been caught, to load the captors with fulsome
flattery.
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