Ir we may judge by the cartoon in Punch, the subject that engaged the public attention most when the mail that arrived yesterday left home, was the Whitechapel murders, and the failure of the police to discover the criminal. Of course with the town in such a state of excitement as it was, an excitement that must have been enormously increased by the later murders of which we have had news by wire, much injustice has been done to the police, and it is well to read what the Spectator has to say on their side The solitariness of the criminal once estab lished, and the ian having got away long enough to wash himself, the difficulties of the police became almost insuperable, A man in the East End of London is a grain of sand as invisible, and almost as much beyond identification amidst the mass, There are tens of thousands of men nearly alike, dressed substantially in the same way, living the same life, and usually so little offensive that the eye and the memory lose the habit of noticing or recording their appearance, Ask any servant or clerk to describe the caller who has not left name, enquire as to dress, age or even colour, and you will find how little impression any mnality whatever makes in this endless Jungle of mankin It is true the police constantly catch criminals; but it is either because they have information "—that is, somebody has betrayed the man wanted—or they discover some material substance connecting the criminal and the crime—a wad, made of newspaper, as happened recently—or the existence of @ motive, revenge, anger, jealousy, or cupidity, limits the within Which enquiry can be fruitful, In the Whitechapel case, the criminal can, by the first laws of English nature, have no confidant there is no material clue, except two undiscovered brass rings taken from " wretched woman's dead fingers; and the motive was blood-thirst,—that is, the crime itself was its own impelling cause. The police have nothing to go upon, and are reduced to an endless enquiry in innumerable lodging houses whether aman who may have been a solitary, may have put onan overcoat, and may have cleaned his hands in earth, had come into any of them at6 o'clock in the morning with blood upon his fingers and clothes. It is the last thing he would do at that hour of the day, supposing him sane enough to feel fear; but
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.