Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/198

188 wrongly or unwisely, we have not the right to declare them all insane. It is true that many persons brood over their troubles until everything loses proportion, their minds become unbalanced, and in such a state they kill themselves. In such cases the act may be correctly attributed to insanity. But what are we to say of those who are to all appearance rational and yet are the victims of sudden or growing impulses? Such people are not voluntary agents, and yet they can not be called insane. They are abnormal. There is a fatal defect in their organization which is incompatible with their survival under natural conditions. This defect may give rise to sudden impulses or may cause a growing gradual propensity which terminate in the final tragedy. Instantaneous impulses are often brought about by the slightest circumstances. Thus, gazing steadily at the wheels of an approaching train or looking down from some great height may produce a delirium, a distention of the blood-vessels of the brain, that instantly paralyzes the will of the victim.

In the consideration of those propensities which are of gradual growth we are confronted with an extremely difficult problem. We know that a great many of those who ultimately destroy themselves fight for years against the impulse. How are we to account in such cases for the persistence of the tendency toward suicide, which seems to be a part of their nature, a part which draws them instinctively to death just as the normal creature is drawn to a desire to live? For such cases heredity may be in a great measure responsible. It is clear that hereditary influences may reveal their force in the suicidal impulses as in many other of the problems of life.

Whole families have been known to kill themselves. There are a great many human beings who by nature are predisposed to self-destruction, and only wait through life for a calamity sufficiently great to prompt them to the act. They are victims of their own faulty organizations.

Individual temperament may have a great deal to do with the question of suicide. In America the population is largely composed of the various European races, and although these are living under the same conditions, each nationality retains its own peculiar rate of suicide. Drink and crime are responsible for a large proportion of the daily self-murders. Drunkenness, the most active agent of degeneration known, is directly responsible for those which occur during a period of nervous depression following a debauch. Among the criminal classes suicide is quite common, but it is among the petty and not the grave offenders that it occurs. Poverty and disease are also strong incentives to self-destruction. Suicide is often regulated by the price of bread. Life has few pleasures for the homeless and friendless. Death to