sive practice in the Federal Courts; and it is a curious coincidence that in the first case heard before the late Chief Justice Waite when he went upon the bench (Tappan v. Merchants National Bank) Mr. Fuller, who succeeds him, was of counsel. That was in 1874; and since that time, and for some years before, scarcely a term has passed in which he has not had a case upon the docket.
In 1861 he was a member of the convention called to revise the constitution of the State of Illinois, in which he took an active part and by his legal abilities rendered marked services. In 1862 he was elected to the Illinois legislature, in which body he served one term.
Mr. Fuller is a man of scholarly habits, and some of his more important arguments are mines of philosophical research. He is familiar with several continental languages, and is a ripe scholar in the classics. He will bring to the high position to which he has been appointed a rare culture and such attainments as few lawyers possess. Socially he is a gentleman of courtly dignity and presence, with a kindly, amiable manner indicative of a warm heart and generous impulses.
The appointment of Mr. Fuller has been most favorably received by the legal profession throughout the country. Even his strongest political opponents were among the first to recognize his eminent fitness for the position. Called in the vigor of his manhood from the active practice of the bar, a lawyer of wide experience and commanding position in his profession, and a citizen of the highest personal character, he will undoubtedly prove a worthy successor of Jay and Marshall and Taney and Chase and Waite.
THE WHITE CHAPEL TRAGEDIES.
UP to the present time the perpetrator or perpetrators of that series of murders known as the Whitechapel tragedies are still at large; and so far as public information goes, no important clew to his or their whereabouts has been found. The London populace has displayed its habitual characteristics in connection with these crimes. There has been the usual unreasoning panic,—excusable, perhaps, among the wretched women who belong to the class from which the several victims have seemingly been chosen; barely excusable, too, on the part of the people who reside in the districts where such daring assassinations have occurred; but surely in no degree to be justified in the case of the educated and reasoning citizen at large, or in the case of any section of the metropolitan press. On the subject of the murders the London public has produced a greater quantity of egregiously foolish utterances, in the different shapes of rumor, comment, and so-called suggestion, than could have been collected from a similar number of people in any part of the world. It has also, as a matter of course, blamed the police; while at the same time it has, doubtless with the best intention, done probably as much as in it lay to increase the difficulties in the way of detection. All this was to be looked for. It constitutes one of the most formidable difficulties with which the police are confronted in a case of the kind. And it is hardly to be wondered at, in the circumstances, that many of those engaged in the detection of crime should be willing to dispense with the slight assistance which is to be gained by partially taking the public into their confidence, since it is so disproportionate a compensation for what is thereby lost.
The fact, however, that the murderer or murderers have still to be tracked out is an in-
