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 470 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

contains, as it were, the nucleus of his researches. In this short sketch it is, of course, impossible for me to follow all his inter- esting developments. I must, therefore, refer the reader to the book itself for the statistical data and their detailed discussion. The following are the conclusions Durkheim arrives at. There are three principal types of suicide :

I. The "egoistic" suicide, comprising all cases of voluntary death caused by relaxation of social ties, be they religious, familial, or political, i. e., by a morbid development of individualism. Protest- antism, in fact, shows a higher rate of suicide because of the stronger spirit of individualism by which it is dominated. It is, as Durkheim textually says, a less "integrated" society than the Catholic. 1 Marriage, likewise, shows a beneficial influence on suicide according to the greater or lesser degree of " integration " offered by the familial society. It is not the so-called "matri- monial selection" (Bertillon) which accounts for the relative immunity of the married as compared to the single, the widowed, and the divorced. Bertillon's hypothesis would render it difficult to explain either the different degrees of immunity shown by the married, according to their various ages, or the unequal immunity of the two sexes. The cause of immunity does not even lie in the fact of marriage itself, because ( I ) while the marriage rate has slightly changed since the beginning of the century, suicide has increased from I to 3 ; (2) the immunity is insignificant for the married without children. It is entirely due to the influence of the family as a social group and varies with its degree of "density" or "integration." 2 The same law governs the life of political societies. Suicide undergoes a real and general decrease at all epochs of political crises. Such a regres- sion, first noticed by Morselli, is due to the strong degree of integration that societies reach through political perturbations. Great social commotions, like great national wars, stimulate the collective feelings, revive party spirit and patriotism, and concen- trate individual activities towards a unique aim. 3

1 Le Suicide, pp. 149-73. ^ Ibid., pp. 215-22.

2 Ibid., pp. 174-214-