The severance between East and West London has been made
strangely obvious this week. There is a club, it appears, in Spitalfields, where dramatic performances are given to Jewish audiences in Hebrew, and on Tuesday night, a little after 11, some five hundred persons were gathered to see a comedy, when a false alarm of fire was raised. The gas was turned off by somebody on the stage, and the audience, wild with alarm, rushed from the gallery and the pit to the vestibule, and
got jammed in the doorway. The people in the gallery con- tinued to flow down, and a fight for existence began, ending in the suffocation of the weaker. Seventeen men, women, and children were crushed to death, often by blows and trampling, and the bodies of the dead exhibited signs of most acute suffering. Had such a catastrophe occurred in St. James's Hall, all London would have rung with it; but as it was, the- morning papers only heard of it through the Press Association,. and it was not till the afternoon of Wednesday that any details were published. There is a rumour, supported by some action which the Jews have taken, that the alarm of fire was wilful, and intended to facilitate robbery. It is certain that several persons were robbed in the/nage; but it is more probable that the panic arose from an accidental escape of gas.
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