When I opened my "Daily Telegraph" I found that my correspondent had carried out his threat. He had shot himself—fortunately not fatally—in Regent Street the previous evening. I gave the ticket of the bag to the police, who handed it over to the poor fellow's relatives. The bag contained jewellery and securities to the value of many hundreds of pounds.
A painful feature in this phase of London life is the large number of children who are not in possession of their mental faculties, and yet are not under any proper control. Of the little boy who murders a baby brother or sister we hear occasionally. Of the child who only attempts to murder we hear rarely. But the schools for the feeble-minded which are now established in every part of London have a large number of dangerous children of both sexes passing daily from and to their homes and enjoying the full liberties of life in the streets.
This is not the place in which to set forth the terrible dangers to which society will presently be exposed by the ever-increasing numbers of mental and physical degenerates for whose detention, after a certain age, no provision is made by the State.
But before this series is concluded I may, with all due discretion, lift a portion of the veil and give my readers some slight insight into one of the most disquieting phases of life in this great city of packed and seething humanity.
It is not a phase which can be ignored, for statistics show us that the feeble-minded and the insane are increasing at a rate which is entirely out of proportion to the rate of increase in the population.
For every lunatic at large to-day we shall have—unless legislation finds a means of minimizing and dealing with the evil—five lunatics at large in ten years' time.
And it is to lunatics at large that we owe some of the most gruesome, the most appalling Mysteries of modern London.