Criminals and Crime
Sir Robert Anderson
Published in 1907, Criminal and Crime contains a few paragraphs within the introduction in which Anderson discusses the Ripper crimes. He asserts that the letters sent to the press and police were the work of "an enterprising journalist," and makes a passing mention at the end that the murderer was "safely caged in an asylum." This idea would be expounded in The Lighter Side of My Official Life, published three years later in 1910.
The peril to the community caused by common crimes, as distinguished from crimes of the first magnitude, will be obvious to the thoughtful. For example, a man who murders his own wife is not necessarily a terror to the wives of other men. A man who kills his personal enemy excites no dread in the breast of strangers. Or again, take a notorious case of a different kind, "the Whitechapel murders" of the autumn of 1888. At that time the sensation-mongers of the newspaper press fostered the belief that life in London was no longer safe, and that no woman ought to venture abroad in the streets after nightfall. And one enterprising journalist went so far as to impersonate the cause of all this terror as "Jack the Ripper," a name by which he will probably go down to history. But no amount of silly hysterics could alter the fact that these crimes were a cause of danger only to a particular section of a small and definite class of women, in a limited district of the East End ; and that the inhabitants of the metropolis generally were just
as secure during the weeks the fiend was on the prowl, as they were before the mania seized him, or after he had been safely caged in an asylum.
