Eliza Armstrong has been at last restored to her mother
by the police, amidst a great popular demonstration of satisfaction, but the accounts put forth concerning both her mother and her- self by different authorities are so utterly irreconcileable that it is not possible to think that the various authorities who have dealt with her have been straightforward with the public. We are told in the speech of the editor of the Pall Mall at St. James's Hall that he alone was responsible for the most un- justifiable treatment of Eliza Armstrong, to which she was it seems subjected merely in order to show that great crimes could be easily committed. Mr. Stead further denounced Mrs. Arm- strong as having admitted her own infamy ; but no charge of the kind was repeated in the account of the transaction which appeared on Tuesday in the Pall Mall Gazette, according to which account a neighbour, and not the mother, was the person dealt with in this very disgraceful transaction. If Mrs. Armstrong is the respectable woman she is believed to be by many who have taken up the matter, she has been most foully libelled. And if she has not been so libelled we do not understand why the strong invective of Friday was so strictly avoided in the official account of Tuesday. The whole story, and its apparently deliberate identi- fication with a very different and still worse, though unverified story, has been in any case a very discreditable mixture of fact with fiction, a juggle which should put the public on their guard against some of the new crusaders. Straightforwardness and simplicity of procedure are the first and most natural guarantees of moral purpose. Mystification is a sure note of moral perversion.
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