Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1884 — GANG RULE IN LONDON. [ARTICLE]

GANG RULE IN LONDON.

Part* of the City Given Over to Young RnfWann The whole of the very large district extending from Duncan terrace, south of the Angel, Islington, around to King’s Cross, northward, and on by Guilford street, to the borders of the “holy land” of Russell«nd the adjoining squares, writes a correspondent to the London Standard, is infested —and has been for years—with both day and night ruffianism. This composition of it takes the form of gangs of “unlicked cubs” of from 14 to 20 years of age, whose fond amusement is to pelt people with hard clay, and break. he windows with stones. Neither man, woman, nor child can escape them. If they are remonstrated with by a passer-by, they at once follow him, felling in his ears the now established boy yell of the streets; and if he happens to reside near their meeting quarters, they wait for him every time he goes into or leaves his house. Our correspondent knows an elderly gentleman who has been persecuted—tortured is a more correct expression—in this w T ay for many months; indeed, to such an unbearable extent that he is endeavoring to find somewhere within the metropolitan area where he can come home from his day’s professional work and be in quiet. He told “M.” when they were speaking upon the subject last week that the roughs had paraded with their yell-chorus up and down in front of his sitting-room window. When they are in gangs of three and four they have girls with them who give the signals for the approach of police and of victims. They never go into the squares, the reason being, as two of them said, “O, we should get locked up if we went to have our games there.” “M.” and his however, who are equally ratepayers in the old suburban neighborhoods, are to have their evening lives made wretched because they do not live “in the squares,” and all this with a police army of eleven thousand men. A friend of his, who resides in another district, says that he has had conversations with the police upon the' subject, and they have expressed the strongest indignation that their powers are so crippled in the matter, and, as if to demonstrate that crippling, while we were conversing at my door, one of a gang with two girls went by. They looked at us as they passed, and when they got about fifty yards on they set up their unearthy yells, ending with shouts of defiant laughter, and took to their heels. The utterly unaccountable leniency of the police magistrates was clearly shown to lie at the bottom of such a shocking state of things—a state that would be impossible in the smallest town or village in England. Surely the overburdened ratepayers of London are entitled to the overflow of some of that consideration which is now costing millions in the land of the pyramids. A gentleman, in another case, has repeatedly to walk on sentry in front of his own house to keep these juvenile ruflians from making his door-porch their headquarters. He said to me: “They have broken some of my windows for what I am doing now, and have further threatened me. I have spoken to the police, but”—and here he shrugged his shoulders as- a yelling chorus opened out not fifty feet away from us.