"Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands morn."
Every now and then the world is startled with an event of a like character
to the one which has just aroused in the city of Philadelphia the utmost
excitement, and which came near producing a scene of riot and even
bloodshed.
John Herriges is the name of the victim, and for an indefinite period of
from ten to twenty years has been confined in a little cagelike room and
kept in a condition far worse than the wild animals of a menagerie.
What adds an additional phase of horror to the case of this unfortunate
creature is the fact that he was thus confined in the same house with his
own brother and mother. To our minds this is the most abhorrent feature of
the whole affair.
We can imagine how a stranger, or an uncle, or an aunt possessed with the
demon of avarice could deliberately imprison the heir to a coveted estate
in some out of the way room or loft of a large building where the victim
would be so far removed from sight and sound as to prevent his groans and
tears being heard or seen. But how a brother and, Merciful Heaven, a
mother could live in a shanty of a house year after year with a brother,
and son shut up and in the condition in which the officers of the law
found poor John Herriges, is more than we can account for by any process
of reasoning. It only shows what perverted human nature is capable of.