THE "WHITECHAPEL" MARTYR.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2561, 8 December 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE " WHITECHAPEL" MARTYR.

What 'Dark Annie' has Achieved.

The London Daily Telegragh had the following remarkable piece of ' fine' writing:—" Dark Annie still walks Whitechapel unavenge by Justice—most miserable, most desolate, moat degraded, most forgotten and forsaken of all her sex in this vast metropolis. Destiny also reserved for her to perish most awfully au:l mysteriously of all the recent martyrs of neglect by the hand of some horrible assassin who, not content with slaying, desecrated and multilated the body of his victim. The inhuman murderer still comes and goes about our streets free and unpunished, holding in his guilty heart the secret known only to him, to heaven, and to the dead, and yet even this forlorn and despised citizen of London cannot be said to have suffered in vain. On the contrary she has effected more by her death than many long speeches iu Parliament and countless columus of letters to the newpapers could have brought about. She has forced innumerable people, who never gave one serious thought before to the Bubject, to realise how it is, and where it is, that our vast floating population, the waifs and strays of our thorouhfares, live and sleep at nights, and what sort of accommodation our rich and enlightened capital provides for them after so many Acts of Parliament passed to improve the dwellings of tho poor, and so many millions spent by our Boards of Works, our vestries, and what not. It is comparatively ea-y to be virtuous when one retires at the first feeling of sleep toa cosy bedroom with luxurious appointments, all kinds of comforts, and the bright fire-light perchance dancing upon soft pillows and snowy sheets. It is easy to be respectable even with simply comfort without luxury ; but ' Dark Annie's' dreadful end has compelled a hundred thousand Londoners to reflect what it must be like to have no home at all except the ' common kitchen' of a low lodging' house, to sit there—sick aud weak and bruised and wretched ; for lack of four pence with which to pay for the right of a ' doss,' to be turned out after midnight to earn the requisite pence anyhow and anywhere, and in course of earning it to come across your murderer aud to caress your assassin. As all know, she never did come back, and Mr Matthews, who will now spend a hundred pounds to find her butchers, has not the ghost of an idea where tc find him. Nevertheless, ' Dark Annie' will effect iu one way what fifty Secretaries of State could never accomplish. By her ghastly fate, incurred upon that hard errand to earn a few hours' sleep, she has constrained all London to meditate once more upon these hideous holes and corners where our very poor huddle at night to hide and slumber— these foul breeding'places of vice and filthy refuges of recklessness, where womanhood must unsex itself and self" respect adandons everything to despair, and where to be decent is out of the questiou, and to remain virtuous is unpermitted and impossible.