The Morning Astorian

BUTCHERY UP-TO-DATE.

Dignified, peaceful, historic old Boston is to the fore with the latest thing in human butchery. The Jordan horror holds the stage for the moment by reason of the rare cold-bloodedness of the thing, and the absence of actual murderous intent. The horrid excess of the matter lies in the lengths to which the young husband (after killing his 23-year-old wife by knocking her down stairs) went in destroying the evidence of his terrible blunder; in the brutal mutilation of her body, and the gross handling and packing of the remains in a trunk. A man cool enough to go to such extremes as this, it seems to us, should have had wit enough to employ nicer and more deliberate means of concealment: he might have used a couple of suit-cases, if he had been a bit more skilful in his carving and more adroit in the art of packing; or, in the interest of real expert demonstration in fin de siecle slaughtering, he could have used candy-boxes and embroidered paper and expressed the stuff to fictitious people across the continent: or, by giving himself up to the actual artistic demands of the moment, he might have reduced the body to charm-like proportions and mailed it in jewel boxes, to the leading murderers now in hock throughout the country, as mementoes of an accomplishment in their line that would have been an eye-opener to the profession; or again to carry the impression still farther and create an appreciable uproar in the avid circles of the sensation-mongers of America, he might have sliced the poor girl into modern post-cards, properly prepared, and stamped with a brief intimation of their human quality, and posed for all time as the chief fiend of his day and age.

This is all very raw and gross and coarse, but not more so than the detailed story sent yesterday into every home in the United States as news matter. It is one of the blighting (and rankest) extremes to which modern social life is subjected, in the way of perpetuating and magnifying the bloodlust of a people.